"UPS and the Teamsters: A History Built on Myths"

United Parcel Service, a global logistics company with revenue of $91 billion in 2024, is the largest private employer of union labor in the United States. It is also by far the largest bargaining unit represented by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. While the century-old relationship between the company and the union has been punctuated by strikes and strike threats, it has resulted in full-time employees covered by Teamster contracts earning far above the trucking-industry average in wages and benefits.
Both UPS and the Teamsters have been at pains to depict the history of their relationship in a positive light. UPS’s official policy has long been, to quote a company-sponsored volume, that “Unions are good for our organization.” According to the Teamster website, UPS co-founder James E. Casey asked the Teamsters to organize company employees and “admired [Teamster International President Daniel] Tobin’s leadership and believed in the cause of the Teamsters Union.”
Historical research, however, shows that the rapport between UPS and the Teamsters has never been as friendly as the company and the union claim. On the contrary, evidence reveals that at least for its first half-century, UPS was torn between union demands on the one hand and the desires of its customers on the other. Moreover, much of what the parties have said publicly about their past connections is either highly improbable or totally fictitious. This paper, based on my research for a forthcoming book, will cast the history of one of the most significant and most widely followed labor-management relationships in the United States in an entirely new light.