Tim Sylvester, pres­i­dent of Team­sters Local 804, the union that rep­re­sents the Queens dri­vers, said, ​“The dri­vers deliv­ered their mes­sage to UPS about unfair treat­ment. Now every one of them will be back deliv­er­ing packages.”

Near­ly two months lat­er, all 250, includ­ing Reyes, will be head­ed back to work, their ter­mi­na­tions reduced to ten-day sus­pen­sions. Dri­ver Steven Cur­cio, who says he was one of the first to be fired, cred­its the sup­port of the com­mu­ni­ty, elect­ed offi­cials and par­tic­u­lar­ly his own customers.

On March 26, UPS retal­i­at­ed by begin­ning to give all 250 notices that they’d be ter­mi­nat­ed — but the com­pa­ny did not fire the work­ers all at once. Accord­ing to the Team­sters, UPS fired 20 dri­vers on March 31 and kept the rest wait­ing for the axe to fall while their replace­ments were trained.

Two hun­dred and fifty UPS dri­vers, clad in their brown uni­forms, ral­ly­ing in a Queens park­ing lot, must have been quite a sight. Not very many peo­ple got to see it, how­ev­er. The 90-minute work stop­page out­side the Maspeth, Queens, UPS facil­i­ty on Feb­ru­ary 26 was a spon­ta­neous protest against the fir­ing, alleged­ly with­out due process, of one of their col­leagues, Jairo Reyes.

The saga began on Valen­tine’s Day, when Reyes was told he was fired for clock­ing in ear­ly. His deliv­ery route takes him to a mall in Queens, and he’d been reg­u­lar­ly clock­ing in ear­ly — with per­mis­sion, he says — to get there in time to park at one of the few deliv­ery bays and drop his packages

Under Local 804’s con­tract with UPS, dri­vers have an ​“inno­cent until proven guilty” clause stip­u­lat­ing that they can’t be tak­en off the job until they have a hear­ing, but Reyes was escort­ed off the job on the 14th. When he final­ly received a hear­ing on Feb­ru­ary 26, accord­ing to the union, he was offi­cial­ly fired for dishonesty.

Cur­cio says that after the hear­ing, the union rep­re­sen­ta­tive in atten­dance came through the build­ing and gath­ered the work­ers out­side to explain to them what had hap­pened. That brief­ing became a ral­ly and work stop­page — a wild­cat action that kept the dri­vers in the park­ing lot for about 90 min­utes before return­ing to deliv­er their packages.

Though their con­tract also stip­u­lates that the dri­vers have a right to strike if the com­pa­ny does not ​“abide by the pro­ce­dure pre­scribed for the set­tle­ment of dis­putes and dif­fer­ences,” UPS issued ter­mi­na­tion notices to all 250 dri­vers. A spokesper­son for the com­pa­ny said that they were being let go because of the ​“seri­ous­ness of [their] misconduct.”

The dri­vers con­tin­ued to work for weeks, accord­ing to Cur­cio, amidst rumors and spec­u­la­tion — no one seemed to know for sure when the axe would fall. Then one night at the end of their shift, he says, ​“all of the high­er ups of UPS” showed up. Then, he says, man­age­ment chose 20 dri­vers, seem­ing­ly at ran­dom, to fire that day. Cur­cio was one of them.

​“Whether you’d worked there one year or 30 years, we were all con­sid­ered in that same boat,” says the 19-year UPS vet­er­an. ​“My first thought was, ​‘How are we going to fix this problem?’ ”

The union had been orga­niz­ing to bring UPS to the table from the date of the first inci­dent. Local 804 began with inter­nal mobi­liza­tion, acti­vat­ing net­works of union mem­bers that had recent­ly been used for con­tract nego­ti­a­tions to cir­cu­late infor­ma­tion and a peti­tion of sup­port for the fired dri­vers. Then they reached out to the Work­ing Fam­i­lies Par­ty, of which the Team­sters’ region­al body is a mem­ber, and the WFP put out a peti­tion to the pub­lic on MoveOn.org’s peti­tion site ask­ing for the dri­vers to be rein­stat­ed. The peti­tions cir­cu­lat­ed by dri­vers and the WFP had a total of more than 100,000 sig­na­tures when they were deliv­ered to UPS at a ral­ly on March 21 at the UPS facil­i­ty in Queens, led by Pub­lic Advo­cate Leti­tia James, a long­time Work­ing Fam­i­lies Par­ty ally.

​“Hun­dreds of thou­sands of sup­port­ers rushed to the defense of the 250 work­ers and their fam­i­lies with peti­tion sig­na­tures, social media actions, and phone calls that we were proud to help the Team­sters orga­nize,” says the WFP’s Bill Lipton.

James did­n’t just show up at a ral­ly or two. She promised that if UPS did­n’t come to the table and nego­ti­ate with the work­ers, the com­pa­ny’s tax breaks, busi­ness with the city, and even a ​“sweet­heart park­ing-tick­et pro­gram” that lets the com­pa­ny pay a frac­tion of the price of its park­ing tick­ets might be up for scruti­ny. Comp­trol­ler Scott Stringer also spoke up for the work­ers, as did many mem­bers of the City Coun­cil, at a sec­ond ral­ly and press con­fer­ence at City Hall April 3, after the twen­ty work­ers were fired. Oth­er unions came out in sup­port as well: Trans­port Work­ers Union Local 100 and SEIU 32BJ joined the rally.

UPS respond­ed to the ral­ly by fir­ing anoth­er 17 ran­dom work­ers the next day.

The tide turned, though, when Cur­cio and oth­er fired dri­vers began to vis­it their for­mer cus­tomers to explain the sit­u­a­tion and ask for their sup­port, chal­leng­ing the com­pa­ny’s line that ​“we owe it to our cus­tomers” to fire the drivers.

​“Some of the busi­ness­es that we deliv­er to, I’ve per­son­al­ly deliv­ered to them for 13 years,” he says. ​“Some may say ​‘You know my facil­i­ties bet­ter than I do.’ I know that girl in their office is on vaca­tion or that gen­tle­man isn’t going to be there but his cousin may live down the block. I know where to bring my stuff, I know where to go, where not to go. I know these peo­ple, I see them, espe­cial­ly busi­ness­es, I see them four to five times a week.”

Cur­cio was heart­ened by the reac­tion from the cus­tomers. They want­ed to know why he’d been fired, and were hap­py to show their sup­port for him and his union. He and oth­er dri­vers took pho­tos and shot a video of their cus­tomers call­ing for their dri­vers back.

The out­pour­ing of sup­port from cus­tomers seemed to take away the last angle UPS had to defend its crack­down on the work­ers. The com­pa­ny came to the table to nego­ti­ate with the union and agreed to a deal that would rein­state all the dri­vers — includ­ing Reyes — and change their ter­mi­na­tions to ten-day sus­pen­sions. Cur­cio had already served most of that time; oth­ers will take their sus­pen­sions on a rolling basis.

The work­ers are call­ing this a win, and it’s worth not­ing that it’s a win that came through the will­ing­ness of 250 peo­ple to risk their own jobs to stand up to the boss and to save the job of one of their col­leagues. But the wild­cat action had to be backed up with orga­niz­ing both inside the union and with­in the com­mu­ni­ty (and sym­pa­thet­ic elect­ed offi­cials who owe their posi­tions to union sup­port cer­tain­ly did­n’t hurt, either). It can require quite a lot of pres­sure to bring a mas­sive com­pa­ny like UPS to the table, but the work­ers suc­ceed­ed. The WFP’s Lip­ton says, ​“When work­ers stand togeth­er in sol­i­dar­i­ty they can still win against one of the biggest cor­po­ra­tions in America.”

It’s also worth not­ing that this was a work­place that already had a union con­tract with strong pro­tec­tions for work­ers against sum­ma­ry fir­ings. Just get­ting the con­tract is only the first step; enforc­ing that con­tract requires atten­tion and action on the part of the work­ers. Orga­niz­ing isn’t over when the con­tract is rat­i­fied — in many ways, it is only begin­ning. The UPS work­ers remind us that work­place rights have always been won and held through struggle.

Cur­cio expects treat­ment will be a lit­tle bit bet­ter at the Maspeth facil­i­ty from now on. ​“I think every­one involved learned some­thing from this,” he says. ​“Team­work usu­al­ly always pre­vails in what­ev­er it is in life.”

For now, he’s look­ing for­ward to get­ting back to work. ​“I can’t wait to get back in my lit­tle brown truck and do what I nor­mal­ly do on a dai­ly basis. Go see cus­tomers, deliv­er, do my pick ups and basi­cal­ly back to busi­ness as usual.”