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tenure and replaced him with Taylor. In explaining the move, Hoffa said the union needed to head in a different leadership direction. In an unusually public display of pique, O’Brien said he wanted to include local representatives who disagreed with Hoffa’s strategy in the contract talks but was blocked from doing so because it was “considered treasonous” by the leadership. Hoffa’s critics said that O’Brien was removed because he wanted to give Zuckerman a more active role in the negotiations.

In March, Taylor removed Mike Rankin, a member of Local 89, from the negotiating committee at UPS Freight, whose contract covers 12,000 of the 268,000 UPS employees, for purportedly publicly disclosing some of his concerns with the direction of the talks. Then in May, he removed three more members of the negotiating committee, including two from Local 89, for opposing the hybrid employee proposal.

DON’T WORRY, BE BROWN!

UPS customers appear to be reacting to these issues with a collective shrug. They believe negotiations are progressing as smoothly as could be expected and are not looking to shift business to rivals out of fear of labor-related service disruptions. Rob Martinez, president and CEO of Shipware LLC, a parcel consultancy, said none of his UPS customers have diverted traffic to FedEx Corp., UPS’s chief competitor, even though some are “crossing their fingers” in the hope that a labor agreement is quickly reached.

A large medical distributor, which Martinez didn’t identify, was told by FedEx that if it didn’t convert at least 40 percent of its business in the next few weeks, the carrier would not support the company in the event of disruptions at UPS, he said. FedEx has used that tack with other high-volume shippers, invoking memories of the 15-day Teamster strike in 1997 that blindsided many UPS customers and left them scrambling for alternatives, Martinez said.

UPS has assured the medical distributor that talks are going well and are on track for settlement, Martinez said. Besides, the shipper thinks that FedEx’s promises to come to the rescue ring hollow and that it couldn’t provide remedies if, as Martinez put it, “the shit hit the fan.”

A HOUSE DIVIDED

With so much at stake, it behooves the Teamsters to present a united front when going up against UPS, which prepares for contract talks much like an athlete training for the Olympics. However, the Teamster leadership is as splintered today as at any time in recent memory. James P. Hoffa, who has been gener-al-president since 1998, came within a whisker of losing the union’s November 2016 elections to Fred Zuckerman, the firebrand leader of Louisville’s Local 89, which represents more UPS workers than any other local because it’s located in the home of UPS’s global air hub.

Zuckerman outpolled Hoffa
in the U.S. but lost the election
because he was soundly beaten
in Canada. Perhaps more signifi-
cant as it relates to the UPS talks,
Zuckerman captured the majori-
ty of votes cast by the company’s
workers, a sign of little or waning
confidence among many UPSers in
the mainstream leadership.

Discontent with Hoffa and the-then package division chief, Ken Hall, had been building as far back as the last contract cycle. Three Teamster locals, including Local 89, repeatedly rejected their local addendums known as “ supplements,” thus preventing the national contract, which had already been ratified, from being implemented. The dispute dragged on for about nine months until the Washington leadership in April 2014 took the extraordinary step of imposing the national contract on all UPS members. The decision left a bitter taste in many members’ mouths, and their angst was reflected 31 months later at the ballot box.