UPS did not escape this wave of mil­i­tan­cy, as Joe Allen points out in his new book The Pack­age King: A Rank and File His­to­ry of Unit­ed Par­cel Ser­vice . ​“UPS was shak­en by an unprece­dent­ed mil­i­tan­cy of its work­force from 1968 to 1976,” he wrotes, ​“when local and region wide strikes shut down the com­pa­ny for months on end.”

Undis­ci­plined work­ers meant not only shop floor mil­i­tan­cy, but also work­ers will­ing to shut down pro­duc­tion for a bet­ter stan­dard of liv­ing. In 1974, there were 424 strikes of 1,000 or more work­ers in the Unit­ed States. (There were 12 in 2015).

I remem­ber enter­ing the blue-col­lar world in 1968; my fel­low work­ers and I were cocky, defi­ant and unin­tim­i­dat­ed by the boss. We were con­fi­dent in our abil­i­ty to take a stand or to find anoth­er job. Man­age­ment would cer­tain­ly have cho­sen anoth­er word to describe us: most like­ly, that word would be undisciplined.

After the strike was set­tled, Gary Bryn­er, the 29-year-old Pres­i­dent of Local 1119, tes­ti­fied before a Sen­ate sub­com­mit­tee. ​“There are symp­toms of the alien­at­ed work­er in our plant. The absen­tee rate has gone con­tin­u­al­ly high­er. The turnover rate is enor­mous. [The Lord­stown work­er] has become alien­at­ed. He is dis­as­so­ci­at­ed with the whole estab­lish­ment. That is going to lead chaos.”

In 1972, the Gen­er­al Motors plant in Lord­stown, Ohio was shut down by a strike that left both man­age­ment and union lead­er­ship scratch­ing their heads. The strike, by Unit­ed Auto Work­ers Local 1119, was not called over the tra­di­tion­al bread-and-but­ter issues of wages and ben­e­fits, but rather work­ing con­di­tions and some­thing a bit less tan­gi­ble. Call that ​“some­thing” con­trol, or ​“alien­ation.” What­ev­er the issue was, its emer­gence as an issue work­ers were angry enough to walk off the job over was some­thing new in Amer­i­can labor relations.

This sit­u­a­tion could not stand. In 1973, the post­war eco­nom­ic boom came to a screech­ing halt. Allen writes that at this junc­ture, ​“The boss­es respond­ed to the eco­nom­ic cri­sis with a con­cert­ed effort to dri­ve down wages, increase pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and weak­en union orga­ni­za­tion.” The same sen­ti­ment took hold across the Amer­i­can busi­ness land­scape. In effect, a 40-year war was declared, a ​“one-sided class war” that is still raging.

The Pack­age King describes the chasm that sep­a­rates the post-World War II world from the age of aus­ter­i­ty. ​“There was an his­toric change begin­ning, in the mid-1970s, when work­ing at UPS became more dan­ger­ous, part-time work tri­umphed and the union was sig­nif­i­cant­ly weak­ened.” Unit­ed Par­cel Ser­vice was deter­mined to do its part in tam­ing a recal­ci­trant workforce.

One of the tac­tics in assert­ing the company’s author­i­ty at the point of pro­duc­tion was the nev­er-stop­ping con­vey­or belt of pack­ages. The con­vey­or belt’s per­pet­u­al motion was part of what was known as the ​“Push­er Men­tal­i­ty.” Although not explic­it­ly stat­ed in inter­nal com­pa­ny mem­o­ran­da, this pol­i­cy was aimed at old­er, expe­ri­enced work­ers. Old­er work­ers were less like­ly to accom­mo­date to the new speed­ed up norm, and in many cas­es were phys­i­cal­ly unable to keep up the inhu­man pace expect­ed. To weed out old­er, full time work­ers the com­pa­ny pub­lished a pam­phlet for its super­vi­sors called, ​“How to Get a Dis­charge for Low Pro­duc­tiv­i­ty Sus­tained,” or in nor­mal Eng­lish, how to fire old­er work­ers and make it stick.

The ​“Push­er Men­tal­i­ty” was about speedup, but it was also about con­trol. Con­trol is the Holy Grail of the work­place from management’s point of view. Part of the dri­ve for con­trol was the empha­sis on part-time work­ers as opposed to full time employ­ees. Part-time work­ers can be forced to work when, where and for how much time, all at management’s convenience.

UPS’s goal was stat­ed suc­cinct­ly: ​“We must con­trol and accel­er­ate our efforts to absorb as much as pos­si­ble ris­ing costs by tough con­trols, … elim­i­nate full time work­ers (and make them) part-time when­ev­er pos­si­ble and fur­ther increase pro­duc­tion of those who are work­ing.” ​“Part-time work,” Allen writes, ​“was a busi­ness mod­el that UPS pio­neered and ini­ti­at­ed around the globe in the next two decades.”

Ever greedy for more and more part timers, in 1976 UPS sought to make all its inside employ­ees (those who sort and han­dle parcels in ware­hous­es and ter­mi­nals) ​“casu­al” work­ers, a euphemism for ​“pre­car­i­ous” — or even more hon­est, ​“expend­able.”

By the time of the 1982 con­tract, part-time work­ers — by then over half of UPS’s work­force — were once again in the company’s crosshairs. The 1982 con­tract called for a new two-tier wage struc­ture. While full-time employ­ees were earn­ing an aver­age of between $11 and $12 per hour, for the first time part-timers had their pay cut to $8 per hour. That gap would not be closed by accrued senior­i­ty. In effect, the part time work­ers were caught in a clas­sic scis­sors: increased pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and less pay. This deal, agreed to by the Inter­na­tion­al Broth­er­hood of Team­sters, was a slow act­ing poi­son pill for the old guard lead­er­ship that final­ly released its ven­om for the IBT in the 1991 elec­tion of reformer Ron Carey, and for UPS in the land­mark 1997 strike.

In addi­tion to telling the sto­ry of how UPS did its part in tam­ing that recal­ci­trant work­force, The Pack­age King also tells the sto­ry of the treach­er­ous role the bureau­crat­ic lead­er­ship of the IBT played in aid­ing and abet­ting that project. More inspir­ing­ly, it tells the sto­ry of the insur­gency of the rank and file inside the Team­sters union. Allen chron­i­cles how that insur­gency even­tu­al­ly took pow­er from the old lead­er­ship and led the union in a text­book strike, only to see the old guard bureau­cra­cy reestab­lish itself.

Jim Casey, the founder of the Unit­ed Par­cel Ser­vice was a mega­lo­ma­ni­ac in the mold of the 19th cen­tu­ry rob­ber barons. Pack­ages and their deliv­ery were his only pas­sion. By 1916 Casey real­ized that soon­er or lat­er UPS would become union­ized. Rather than risk affil­i­a­tion with the still potent Indus­tri­al Work­ers of the World, Casey took the proac­tive step of invit­ing the Team­sters to orga­nize the UPS work­ers. This began a cen­tu­ry-long rela­tion­ship between these two giants, a sym­bio­sis made up often of mutu­al need and occa­sion­al­ly antagonism.

The Team­sters Union, found­ed in 1903, comes out of the old Amer­i­can Fed­er­a­tion of Labor (AFL) tra­di­tion. His­tor­i­cal­ly this tra­di­tion is called, ​“busi­ness union­ism.” Busi­ness union­ism was the phi­los­o­phy of Samuel Gom­pers, which teach­es that if work­ers want ​“to get ahead, they must be pre­pared to go along” — no talk of unions being part of a broad­er trans­for­ma­tion of soci­ety or chal­leng­ing cap­i­tal­ism, just a strong con­cern for bread-and-but­ter issues like pay and ben­e­fits. For most of its 100 plus years col­lab­o­ra­tion with man­age­ment has been the usu­al modus operan­di of the IBT. How­ev­er, there have been peri­ods of push­back from the ranks, notably dur­ing the Min­neapo­lis Team­ster strike of 1934 and the inter­reg­num years between the Old Guard and Ron Carey’s pres­i­den­cy from 1991 to 1998.

Tak­ing on both the mobbed-up, col­lab­o­ra­tionist IBT and the deter­mined behe­moth that is the UPS was a Her­culean task, and a sto­ry The Pack­age King tells well and in great detail. What became the twin con­fla­gra­tions of Carey in 1991 and the 1997 strike began with sev­er­al tiny sparks.

One such spark can be traced back to a coura­geous woman named Anne Mack­ie. Anne, a West Coast native, joined the Inter­na­tion­al Social­ists (IS) in the ear­ly 1970s. When the IS decid­ed to con­cen­trate its mem­ber­ship in the Mid­west, she moved from Port­land to Cleve­land. Because she had already been a pack­age car dri­ver in Port­land, Mack­ie found it easy to get a sim­i­lar UPS job in Cleve­land. Mack­ie, with a group of oth­er most­ly women ISers in Cleve­land, found­ed Upsurge, a rank-and-file group in 1975 — the same year IS mem­bers in freight launched Team­sters for a Decent Con­tract (TDC), which lat­er became Team­sters for a Demo­c­ra­t­ic Union (TDU).

His­to­ri­an Cal Winslow, author of Labor’s Wars in Cal­i­for­nia, writes of UPSurge: ​“It was first of all orga­nized to fight the com­pa­ny. Its ini­tial focus was prepa­ra­tion for the 1976 Cen­tral States con­tract nego­ti­a­tions. It began in the cen­tral and was built on an infor­mal shop stew­ards’ net­work with roots in decades of mil­i­tant activ­i­ty. In the 1960s and 70s there were con­tin­u­ous con­flicts and strikes, offi­cial and unof­fi­cial includ­ing trav­el­ing wild­cat pick­ets in 1975 (at UPS).”

To illus­trate just how entrenched the bureau­cra­cy was in the Inter­na­tion­al Broth­er­hood of Team­sters and how much that bureau­cra­cy loathed its own rank and file, take this quote from 1950s IBT Pres­i­dent Dave Beck: ​“Why should truck dri­vers and bot­tle wash­ers be allowed to make deci­sions affect­ing Team­ster pol­i­cy?” To estab­lish a mil­i­tant union that reject­ed such elit­ist atti­tudes and lis­tened to the wish­es of its rank and file, TDU had its work cut out for it.

Pack­age King’s step by step nar­ra­tive of how major changes in the Team­sters and in labor his­to­ry can and did hap­pen, should serve as an exam­ple to any young mil­i­tants enter­ing the trade union move­ment today. Any­one inter­est­ed in tak­ing on the rich and pow­er­ful on the shop floors of the 21st cen­tu­ry should down­load and read this book.