With 1.3 million members, the Teamsters are the largest transportation union in North America. As the US economy continues to reshape itself around the sprawling logistics industry, whoever is elected the next Teamster leader will face the daunting task of organizing this vast, nonunion workforce — one that will determine much of the future of the labor movement.

Teamsters will make that decision this October, in an election contest that pits the seventeen-year incumbent general president James P. Hoffa against challenger Fred Zuckerman, the president of the fifteen-thousand-member Teamsters Local 89 in Louisville, Kentucky, and his Teamsters United reform slate.

Zuckerman’s local is one of the largest Teamster locals in the country and represents eight thousand workers at the United Parcel Service’s mammoth air hub “Worldport,” where hundreds of daily flights take off to deliver packages to 220 countries around the globe.

Worldport’s continued expansion means that Zuckerman’s Local 89 will be the biggest Teamsters local union in the near future.

Zuckerman was Hoffa’s director of the Teamsters’ carhaul division (the workers that get the brand new cars from the assembly line to your local showroom) before he was fired by Hoffa for opposing concessions.

He has since been banished by Hoffa from any significant leadership body outside his local union despite his local’s importance in the UPS system and his expertise in carhaul.

The seventy-five year-old Hoffa has wide name recognition in and outside out of the union, in part thanks to his father, Jimmy Hoffa Sr, who entered prison in 1967 and is presumed dead since his disappearance in July 1975. Hoffa thinks everything is just great with the union — couldn’t be better.

“Everybody wants to be a Teamster!” he boasted from the stage in front of mostly adoring delegates at the recent Teamster convention in Las Vegas.

He pointed to the three hundred thousand workers that joined the Teamsters in the past decade — a number that sounds impressive without closer inspection.

In 2011, for example, twenty thousand correctional, probation, and parole officers with the Florida Department of Corrections (FDOC) joined the Teamsters. They were previously members of the Police Benevolent Association and were one of the largest groups of workers to affiliate to the Teamsters in years.

Hoffa also highlighted the affiliation of 13,500 public employees formerly represented by the San Bernardino Public Employees Association, and 1,700 San Diego nurses and medical technicians, who are formerly members of the United Nurses of Children’s Hospital.

This “organizing” is more like old-fashioned raiding. Rather than bringing unorganized workers into the labor movement, the Teamsters have in these cases simply shuffled already unionized members from a series of small unions to the IBT.

How this will lead to the unionization of the logistics industry is unclear, if not an outright distraction. The Teamsters have to decide what type of union it will be — a transportation and logistics union or a catchall general workers’ union.

The Teamsters were the most powerful in the postwar era when they organized the freight industry, which was at the center of the American economy.

Their future is in organizing the logistics industry, which is now at the center of American industry — not in scattershot organizing across industries as varied as health care and corrections officers.

Those workers have joined a union that has lost significant ground in its core industries. The National Master Freight Agreement (NMFA), once the jewel in the Teamsters’ crown that covered four hundred thousand workers with some of the best wages, working conditions, and benefits in the labor movement is now a ghost of itself.

It covers less than seventy-five thousand workers and continues to shrink because Hoffa negotiated concessions and bailouts to the remaining unionized freight companies that have weakened the union.

Meanwhile, Amazon now employs nearly ninety thousand workers at its warehouses (“fulfillment centers”) — all of which are nonunion — and continues its building spree.

With an expanding, unorganized logistics industry and significant ground lost in key unionized industries, the Teamsters are in a state of emergency.

But Hoffa and his supporters don’t want to hear about it. They are not only contemptuous of any criticism of his leadership but have publicly declared the election a waste of time.

The hostility to democracy was best summed up by Hoffa supporter and delegate Bernadette Kelly in a bizarre statement from the floor of the convention:

I have a point of privilege, Mr. Chairman [Hoffa]. I have worked with you since 1994 in lock step to rebuild this union, and I’m impressed with the breadth and the depth of the success of the IBT and the power of the Teamsters. And the incredible leadership of Jim Hoffa and Ken Hall is on display for all of us to see, and the unity is from coast to coast and from Canada to Puerto Rico. Yet this union is threatened by a small minority. They’re trying to force the IBT to spend millions of dollars that could go to organizing and other programs to bring this union forward in a futile attempt to gain office. I’m appealing to you. I’m appealing to those people to join with us to move this union forward instead of attempting to divide us for the next five months!

Several Hoffa delegates were more than verbally contemptuous and physically threatened and intimidated reform delegates at the Las Vegas convention.

Indianapolis Teamster leader and Hoffa running mate Brian Buhle had two members of his entourage threaten reform delegate Tim Carroll when he spoke on the convention floor in support of Teamsters United. They bumped into Carroll, threatening to “kick his ass” and to “mash [his] head in.” Buhle was fined by the Teamster election supervisor for their actions.

There are few places in the world where democratic elections are openly denigrated, reformers openly bullied, and a cult of personality praised without there being loud protests and sanctimonious statements from the US State Department and major media outlets.

Such behavior would be quickly denounced as outside of democratic norms. Yet when it comes to the Teamsters, it is ignored.