The Package King: a Review of Joe Allen’s Rank and File History of UPS

I read  The Package King: A Rank and File History of UPS while on my breaks during UPS’ peak season, the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas. I got the book as a birthday gift from my mother, herself a longtime union activist, shortly after I started working for the company. I am a package handler at the company, loading feeder trucks that travel between various UPS sorting hubs.

The book is written by longtime International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) activist and former UPS driver Joe Allen. Written in the tradition of socialist muckraker Upton Sinclair’s The Flivver King, it chronicles the history of UPS in a roughly chronological fashion and serves as a pro-labor companion to Greg Niehman’s Big Brown: The Untold Story of UPS, which gives management’s view of the company’s history. Allen’s book turns Niehman’s on its head, showing that the growth of the company was built not by pluck and guile but by ruthlessly exploiting UPS workers.

Joe Allen’s book charts UPS’  early history of racism in refusing to hire Blacks, it’s undercutting of wages by hiring more part-timers to do full time work, and the disregard of employee safety by pushing further speedups in the company. UPS also worked federally to undermine the Occupational Health and Safety Administration by bankrolling anti-OSHA politicians and generously funding anti-OSHA lobbying groups.

If the book’s villain is the company, the heroes are the rank and file IBT members who work at UPS and have fought for union democracy and against giveback contracts. Allen recounts the story of UPSurge, a rank and file movement of UPS workers that sprang out of the International Socialists in the 70s. UPSurge created a worker’s paper that reached 15,000 people and led numerous wildcat strikes at UPS throughout the late 70s. Movements like UPSurge and later Teamster for a Democratic Union, also initiated by organized socialists, would lead to not only the democratization of the IBT but also the historic UPS strike in 1997.

The UPS strike was particularly significant due to the immediately preceding history of the labor movement. It occurred after years of concessionary contracts agreed to by the union and amidst a decade of decline in labor’s strength and militancy after the defeated PATCO strike. Despite this history, the strike was a huge success with nearly 100% of UPS Teamsters participating and the company agreeing to all of the union’s  central demands.

A key reason for the success of this strike was the newly elected reform leadership of the Teamsters. The reform movement of the Teamsters won the right for members to directly elect the top offices of the union in 1989 and in 1991 Ron Carey became the first directly elected president of the IBT. Carey was himself a UPS driver before running for president of IBT local 804. Even then, Allen recounts that he faced an unsuccessful blackmail attempt to force him from office. He then parlayed his success as president of the local into becoming union president, bringing his hard bargaining approach to the international union.

A chapter that should be read by every DSA member is “The ‘Get Carey’ Campaign” which highlights the ultimately successful efforts by UPS and Washington politicians to witch hunt Ron Carey, the only reform President of the IBT, out of the union. This section reveals the shortcomings of the reform efforts within the IBT that did not challenge the corporate duopoly of American politics Highly partisan accusations were levied within the House of Representatives designed to smear Carey as corrupt. Unfortunately, in the absence of a strong labor party, Teamsters reformers had to rely on Clintonite Democrats who were less than sympathetic to labor. In a memorable exchange a UPS negotiator says to Carey within earshot of Clinton’s Secretary of Labor Alex Harman “You’re dead Carey and you will pay for this you s.o.b.”. Harman then claimed to have not heard anything when asked by Carey.

The Package King is a vital history of America’s largest unionized corporation. It is especially vital that this reprinting has emerged in advance of the 2021 IBT elections and the 2023 UPS contract negotiations. All union activists and socialists ought to read this book and absorb its lessons.