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Inside the Teamsters’ preparations for a UPS strike
On Super Bowl Sunday morning, outside a union hall in Nassau County, New York, the Teamsters had run out of parking. The members of Teamsters Local 804 had gathered at the Local 282 building because their own headquarters, in Long Island City, weren’t large enough for a general membership meeting. Local 804 represents roughly eight thousand United Parcel Service (UPS) workers in New York City, Westchester, and Long Island, making it one of the Teamsters’ largest UPS locals. As members kept arriving, proper spaces filled up, and members left their cars wherever they could — a problem for the union’s neighbor, an ambulance company, whose vehicles were now having trouble navigating the shared parking lot. Upon hearing that their cars were blocking ambulances, the offending union members trudged back to the lot to move. When this many Teamsters are preparing for a strike, it can be tough to find a spot.

Inside the union hall, the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” blared over the speakers as some six hundred members waited for the meeting to begin. Local 804 president Vinnie Perrone, who began working at UPS nearly thirty years ago, said that he hadn’t seen a membership meeting this well attended since Ron Carey was reelected for a second term as president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT).

That was in 1996, and Carey ran as a critic of weaknesses in the UPS contract; he was backed by a coalition that included the Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), a reform caucus founded in 1976 to push for greater rank-and-file democracy within the then-mob-infested union. Carey had started out as a UPS driver in Queens, and before becoming IBT president in 1992, he served as president of Local 804. In 1997, he led the 185,000 UPS Teamsters out on a nationwide strike that lasted fifteen days before the union declared victory. The United States has not seen a strike of that magnitude since.

That may soon change, which is what the Local 804 members were gathered on Long Island to discuss.

 
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