He went on, “That’s great news, because they’re a solvent company—your jobs are secure. But here’s the bad news. A couple weeks ago, a brother, Esteban Chavez, died, twenty-four years old. From the heat!” (Chavez, a UPS driver, was reportedly found unconscious in his package car while on his route near Pasadena. The medical examiner has not yet determined the cause of death.)
Last summer, UPS drivers around the country were using thermometers to check the heat in the back of their vehicles; on social media, photos were circulating of temperature readings above a hundred and twenty degrees. Drivers had been demanding that UPS install air-conditioning in its package cars. The company—which had claimed that A.C. would be “ineffective,” because drivers get in and out of their vehicles so often—said that, among other measures, it was “accelerating the installation of fans” in package cars, and providing drivers with water bottles, cooling towels, electrolyte drinks, and freeze pops.
Teamsters leaders have said that UPS’s measures are not enough. Perrone mentioned another UPS driver who had recently made the news: “There was a kid in Arizona. I don’t know if you guys saw, the video went viral, where he collapsed—on the doorstep.” A doorbell camera had caught the moment, and the customer, who was not home at the time, was so disturbed by the footage that he made it public. In the video, the UPS driver stumbles toward the door with a parcel in hand, then falls to the ground, where he remains for a few moments, legs askew. The incident had occurred on a day when the temperature exceeded a hundred degrees.
“This is what I took from that video,” Perrone said. “They indoctrinate you so much that this kid got up after fainting from the heat in Arizona and rang the customer’s bell! ”
(UPS said in a statement to The New Yorker, “We have strong reasons to believe that this employee was not properly rested and hydrated prior to work that day and there may have been extenuating circumstances which resulted in the collapse.” In addition, the company said, “While there has recently been media attention on heat issues, we have always been faced with operating on hot days, especially in warmer climates. We believe that by training our people to be prepared—and by providing ample resources for support and hydration—we can continue to keep them safe.”)
Perrone told the crowd of drivers, “Today, people are going to say, ‘It’s a nice day.’ Yeah, it’s a nice day. But your package cars are still going to be way over a hundred degrees.” He talked about supervisors who tell drivers to find a “shady area,” or a “cooling station.” “But the next day, what do they do? ‘Oh, you had a gap in time.’ What do they do? They call you in the office and ask you, ‘What happened?’ ” he said. “Do not kill yourselves over this company when to them you are nothing more than a hand truck.”
Perrone handed the microphone back to Andrews. “I know some of you guys start at eight-thirty-five—just be sure to get in before then. I’ll make this short and sweet,” Andrews said. “Working with this company as a driver for twenty years, every single summer in the extreme heat, we all know the question from the customer: ‘Do you have A.C. in the vehicle?’ Right? Obviously, the answer is no. And the same response would be from the customer: ‘Well, that’s a shame. UPS makes tons of money.’ And they’re a hundred per cent right.”
He announced a moment of silence “for our brother Chavez.” Andrews bowed his head, and his fellow-drivers joined him. For a few seconds, the crowd was silent.
Andrews did not permit the silence to last too long. “Thank you,” he said, lifting his head. The drivers gathered for a group photo, and soon afterward they hustled off to work, a blur of brown uniforms crossing Foster Avenue.
There is a slogan on the wall of Local 804 headquarters: “Home of Ron Carey.” Carey started as a UPS driver in Queens in the mid-fifties, then went on to be elected president of Local 804, in 1967. In Steven Brill’s “The Teamsters” (1978), his seminal book about the union, Brill devotes an entire chapter to Carey, depicting him as an honest reformer, the antithesis of many of the men then wielding power within the union. (Its longtime leader Jimmy Hoffa, known for his clout and Mob connections, served time in federal prison for jury tampering, wire fraud, and other crimes.) In 1988, the Justice Department brought a racketeering lawsuit against the Teamsters, in an attempt to stamp out the Mob’s influence, and in 1991 the union held its first democratic elections for its leaders. Carey won, defeating five men, including Hoffa’s son, James P. Hoffa. When Carey took over, he got rid of the union’s private jet and cut his own salary from two hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars to a hundred and fifty thousand.
On August 4, 1997, four days after the Teamsters’ contract with UPS expired, Carey led the company’s workers in their first national strike. (By then, Jim Casey was no longer leading UPS. He died in 1983, at the age of ninety-five.) UPS’s increasing reliance on part-time employees to work as package handlers had become one of the union’s main issues; Carey decried these roles as “part-time throwaway low-wage jobs.” The strike halted UPS’s operations. Peter Jennings, of ABC News, declared it “the most dramatic confrontation between industry and organized labor in two decades.” Airline pilots and autoworkers, as well as Senator Paul Wellstone and the Reverend Jesse Jackson, showed up at UPS workers’ rallies. On the picket line outside the UPS hub in Maspeth, Queens, John Richiusa, a package-car driver, told an interviewer, “There’s enough money to share, and we’re going to make them share it.”
The Teamsters cast their strike not only as a battle against their employer but as a fight for decent jobs for all Americans. Their slogan was “Part-Time America Won’t Work.” Polls showed that a majority of the public supported the workers, and, in this P.R. battle, UPS found itself in a bind. “Rhetorically, it would have been easier for UPS to vilify the workers and to argue that they were greedy,” Deepa Kumar writes in her book “Outside the Box,” an analysis of media coverage of the strike. But “UPS could not do this, because the drivers are its public face.”
By the time the strike ended, the Teamsters had won significant raises and ten thousand full-time jobs. Richiusa recalled, “When we came back after the strike, they were applauding us in the street”—along Queens Boulevard—“and that’s not hyperbole. Because they know how hard we work. They see us covered in sweat, with salt lines striping our shirts.”
“Aim for the ramen!”
Cartoon by Jeremy Nguyen
At Local 804, workers’ euphoria did not last long. Carey lost his position shortly afterward, amid a scandal related to the financing of his reëlection campaign, and James P. Hoffa became president of the I.B.T. He held the position for twenty-three years. In 2021, Sean O’Brien, the leader of a local in Boston, won the election to succeed him, defeating a Hoffa-endorsed opponent. “This is a moment that Local 804 members have waited for, and worked for, for a long time,” Perrone wrote in the local’s newsletter. “We finally put a fork in the Hoffa era.”
The last UPS contract that Hoffa’s team negotiated, in 2018, is still a source of rage and bitterness among many Local 804 members and other UPS workers across the country. It created a two-tier system for package-car drivers; those new to the job—known as “22.4s,” after the contract provision—occupied the bottom tier, with lower pay and less control over their schedules. Fifty-five per cent of the UPS workers who voted rejected the contract, but the I.B.T.’s leaders still imposed it on their members. (They invoked an archaic clause that was then in the Teamsters constitution, which permitted them to ratify a contract if less than two-thirds of the members had rejected it, and if less than half the members had voted.) “That gave the International Union leadership power to shove the contract down our throats and they did it,” 804’s newsletter stated.
Scott Damone, the Local 804 business agent, told me that, for decades, the I.B.T.’s leaders had favored the drivers, who are more active in the union, fighting hard for raises for them while paying less attention to their part-time co-workers. About the leaders’ past treatment of part-timers, he said, “They kept watering down the compensation, and, when they couldn’t water down the compensation any more, they went to benefits.” In the coming contract negotiations, he said, “it’s going to be very important to right some of those wrongs.”