The Package King

A Rank and File History of UPS

Joe Allen

• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781642592177
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Labour & Industrial Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

If the 20th Century was the American Century, it was also UPS's Century.Joe Allen's The Package King tears down the Brown Wall surrounding one of America's most admired companies—United Parcel Service (UPS). The company that we see everyday but know so little about. How did a company that began as a bicycle messenger service in Seattle, Washington become a global behemoth? How did it displace General Motors, the very symbol of American capitalism, to become the largest, private sector, unionized employer in the United States? And, at what cost to its workers and surrounding communities? Will it remain the Package King in the 21st Century or will be dethroned by Amazon?

CHAPTER 1

THE PACKAGE KING

Ah, packages!

—James E. Casey

There are few things in life that get a UPS supervisor or manager more excited than the sight of thousands of packages or Next Day Air envelopes careening down the myriad belts crisscrossing the sorting and distribution centers of the world. Their eyes widen and their breath quickens. You can see the dollars signs popping up in their eyes like old-fashioned cash registers as each package passes them by. Packages of every shape and size are the nuggets of gold from which the UPS fortune is made. They are more important than the physical and mental health of the workers who sort, load, unload, repair, clerk, and deliver them. While UPS may enshrine its corporate “mission” in such noble-sounding words as “service” and “integrity”—as if the company is charged with promoting the common good—it is, first and foremost, in the business of making money off its workers.¹

This obsession with packages over people is nothing new. It goes right back to the company’s hallowed founder, James (Jim) E. Casey. “Casey is a package,” one exasperated retail store manager told the New Yorker in 1947. “Casey once told me that he had never drunk a glass of milk in his life,” the head of a department store told the reporter, “and I thought for a minute he might stop talking about those goddamn packages and tell me why he never drunk a glass of milk. But no! He went right into night loading operations in Chicago.”² On another occasion, Casey, while visiting a store, dropped into the wrapping room and looked around ecstatically at the sight. “Casey’s eyes sparkled and he began to twitch. ‘Deft fingers!’ he said. ‘Deft fingers wrapping thousands of bundles. Neatly tied. Neatly addressed! Stuffed with soft tissue paper! What a treat! Ah, packages!’”

What sparked the interest of the New Yorker, a highbrow cultural magazine, in Jim Casey and UPS? It appears to have been the messy, spontaneous (wildcat) strike on the streets of Manhattan that shut down UPS operations for fifty-one days in the fall of 1946. Back then, UPS did the home deliveries for New York’s leading department stores, such as Lord & Taylor. Customers would buy their items, and the department store would package and wrap them, then hand them over to UPS for home delivery. The strike prevented New York’s middle-class shoppers from getting their goods, and this disruption caught the eye of the editors at the New Yorker.

The magazine assigned Philip Hamburger, who would stay at the New Yorker for a total of six and a half decades, to interview Casey and get a feel for the company that had become so indispensable to New York’s retail businesses.³ This wasn’t the first time the New Yorker had written about UPS. In December 1934, a few years after UPS made the leap from the West Coast to New York City, Casey was featured in the “Talk of the Town” section of the magazine, and the editors gave the story the distinctly condescending title of “Errand Boy.”⁴ The short piece noted that Casey began his career doing “errands” but that the nature of his role had changed considerably. “He’s sort of an errand king now, the head of the United Parcel Service, which delivers packages by the millions in this city and elsewhere.”

The 1934 article picked up on the military, or even cult-like, policies that UPS adopted for its employees. “The employees are about as regimented a bunch of people as you’ve ever heard of. For his first few weeks [an employee is] tutored in driving, delivery, and courtesy. This involves a hundred and thirty-eight rules.” The article even mentioned a UPS summer “camp” for employees, saying that “when business is slack, the unmarried deliveryman may spend [his] time at a camp in Connecticut which the company operates…. Several hundred go there every year for a month or two.”⁵ What went on in these summer camps may be lost to history, but their existence shows that UPS sought to create a private world were employees were encouraged to adopt the values and personality traits of Jim Casey.

By the time Casey was interviewed by Hamburger in 1947, the founder’s stature had risen in New York. Reflecting that change, Casey was bumped up to the “Profiles” section of the New Yorker, a space usually reserved for major figures of the business and political world. He was no longer a new face in town but the leader of a major, growing business. Late in 1946, UPS delivered its one-billionth package and by 1947 employed 2,800 people with 1,700 trucks in New York alone. It operated in seventeen major cities across the United States and delivered one hundred million packages a year. What makes Hamburger’s profile of Casey so interesting, from the vantage point of seven decades later, is that it is a rare, unvarnished, early look at the man—a portrait of Casey very unlike the legendary image that would later be manufactured. The founder comes across as an austere disciplinarian with a more than slightly loopy fascination with packages.⁶

“Casey is a tall, spare man of fifty-nine, with high cheekbones and, most of the time, a rigidly detached expression,” reported Hamburger. He found Casey hard to interview, describing him as “taciturn” and somewhat reluctant to answer questions. However, when they moved from Casey’s fourth floor office at the old Manhattan hub on First Avenue to view the endlessly moving belts of the package sorting system below, Casey perked up. “He becomes animated in the presence of packages.” Hamburger was himself impressed by the “surf-like rumble of the parcels”—a sound recognizable to anyone who has spent time in a UPS hub. It became clear that “Casey’s life is devoted almost entirely to packages.” This vocation for package delivery was combined with a deliberate faux modesty about it all. “‘Anybody can deliver a package,’” Casey told Hamburger. But the New Yorker writer had a keen eye and wasn’t buying Casey’s claim. “He does not believe it,” said Hamburger.

A TIBETAN MONASTERY

Hamburger also noticed that Casey “packaged” the idea of UPS, not unlike the thousands of items that his drivers picked up every day at fashionable New York department stores. “Over the years,” Hamburger wrote, “Casey has taken what might look to outsiders like the simple job of handling and delivering packages and turned it into a semi-religious rite.” A “simple job” is an understatement, but “turning it into a semi-religious rite” is right on the money. Every aspect of the company image was carefully crafted, from the crisply pressed, brown uniforms to the company slogan, “Safe, Swift, Sure.”

The mystique of the UPS driver was an important selling point. UPS drivers, an incredulous Hamburger wrote, “are governed by a series of regulations that could easily be mistaken for the house rules of a Tibetan monastery.” Before hitting the road each day, drivers had to carefully study illustrated cards that scolded them to “check and double check: Are your shoes shined? Is your hair cut? Are you clean-shaven? Are your hands clean? Is your uniform pressed?” If this is a childish way to treat grown men, it didn’t seem to bother Casey, who made periodic visits to UPS hubs to enforce the rules like a general inspecting his troops. “On one such visit,” said Hamburger, “he stood by as a station supervisor assembled a group of drivers and package sorters and examined their shoe shines and haircuts.” He then declared, “The spokes of our wheel spell service” and left the building.

Casey was determined to find the right people to be his drivers, and it began during the hiring phase:

Applicants for United Parcel Service jobs must, first of all, impress … with their neatness and courtesy. If they pass muster on those counts, they are subjected to intelligence tests. No one at United Parcel, least of all Casey, is searching for a genius-type deliveryman. The personnel department has discovered that high-scoring applicants are inclined to be temperamental and to mislay their bundles. Assuming that the results of an applicant’s test place him somewhere in the broad category between wizard and idiot, and that a job is available, he is hired.⁷

Hamburger’s snarky tone aside, he does capture Casey’s search for moldable personalities that he could lay his hands on and shape into perfect drivers. This shaping process continued after work hours. “A man who gets a job at United Parcel finds that his education has just begun. The leisure hours of an employee are supposed to be crowded with self-improvement projects,” explained Hamburger. This included reading the UPS newsletter, The Big Idea, which was filled with homilies to the UPS way of doing business, employee profiles, and Casey witticisms.

Casey never tired of trying to “improve” his drivers. His obsession with packages never flagged, either. In one memorable scene, Hamburger captured both Casey’s obsessions and bigotries very well:

Recently, he stood silent with a friend, watching thousands and thousands of packages. He was silent for several minutes. Then his face lighted up. He seemed exhilarated. “Packages for everybody!” he exclaimed suddenly. “Packages for Chinatown—a difficult area. Drivers have trouble remembering who they left the package with—everybody looks alike! Packages for Harlem—hardly any charge accounts in Harlem! Packages for the West Side—democratic neighborhood. Give packages the kind of welcome packages deserve! Packages for Greenwich Village—very odd packages!”⁸

SEATTLE ORIGINS

UPS founder Jim Casey was born in the remote windswept mining town of Candelaria, Nevada, in 1888. His Irish immigrant father, Henry, was a failed prospector, and, like many others, he developed a debilitating lung disease from his years in the mines that disabled him for the rest of his life. The dominant figure in the Casey family was his mother, Annie. From an early age, young Casey had to work to help keep the family afloat. The Casey family moved to Seattle, which became the launching pad for the company that became known as United Parcel Service.

What was the allure of Seattle for the Casey family? Seattle was a boomtown in the late 1890s because it was the jumping-off city for the Klondike Gold Rush, the last great gold rush on the North American continent. Many Americans are familiar with this historic event through the work of Jack London. Seattle became the bustling way station for those heading north to the inhospitable and unforgiving environments of the Yukon Province of northwestern Canada and Alaska. Eventually 100,000 prospectors made their way north, many of them outfitted by local businesses with clothing they needed to survive the coming harsh winters, as well as mining equipment and food supplies. The city boomed with legitimate and illegitimate businesses that serviced the needs of these would-be prospectors.

It was in this busy city that Casey began his career as a messenger at the age of eleven, delivering tea (and opium). He was mentored by an elderly Irishman who taught him the delivery business.⁹ In 1907, Casey, along with his friend Claude Ryan, founded the American Messenger Service, the very beginning of UPS. Casey’s brother George joined them a few years later.

In the years leading up to the First World War, Seattle and the larger Pacific Northwest was a bastion of US radical politics and working-class militancy. In 1912, Eugene Debs, the presidential candidate of the Socialist Party, received 900,000 votes nationwide, with 40,000 coming from the state of Washington.¹⁰ The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), popularly known as the “Wobblies,” organized thousands of timber workers throughout the Northwest. The decade following the end of the Klondike Gold Rush saw the economy of the region stagnate, but it began to boom again with the outbreak of war in Europe in 1914. When the United States declared war on Germany in 1917, the economy boomed even further, resulting in skyrocketing inflation that ate away at workers’ living standards. An even bigger threat to the lives of radicals, trade unionists, and “suspect” ethnic minorities was the legal assault on their constitutional freedoms by the state and federal governments and their vigilante allies. Despite this hostile atmosphere, the union movement represented by the American Federation of Labor (AFL) grew by 400 percent from 1915 to 1918, while radical and revolutionary ideas spread throughout the working class. The Russian Revolution of 1917, the first successful workers’ revolution in history, received widespread support throughout the Pacific Northwest.¹¹

THE GENERAL STRIKE

This tense political atmosphere exploded in the great Seattle General Strike of 1919, when the working class ran the city from February 6 to February 11. An elected strike committee representing 110 local unions ran the city for five days. It was an incredible display of the potential of workers to run society, not simply negotiate a place in it. Striking trade unionists inspired non-union workers to join the strike. Many strikers and supporters were veterans of the First World War and wore their military uniforms on the picket lines and at demonstrations.

The radicalism of the Seattle working class during the general strike made a deep impression on Jim Casey, who renamed his company United Parcel Service in the historic year of 1919. UPS company historian Greg Niemann argues that Casey was very aware of the politics of his hometown: “The Pacific Northwest of Jim’s early years had a robust social movement, and Seattle … was already known across the country as a haven of left-wing politics.”¹² The Seattle radicals of Casey’s youth, writes Niemann mockingly, “called for the emancipation of the working class from the ‘slave bondage of capitalism,’” and “wanted the working class in possession of economic power, to control business enterprise without regard to capitalist masters.” Casey “couldn’t have helped but notice the unrest and reasons underlying the working-class argument. Flyers, demonstrations, meetings, and strikes were commonplace in those early years of the twentieth century. For Jim, already in the messenger and delivery business, the working classes were potential customers and employees.”¹³

Whether Casey truly understood the “unrest” is subject to debate. Niemann never quotes him directly. Casey’s opinions are inferred from Niemann’s interviews with UPS managers and some family members. Yet it may be true that Casey had some grasp of working-class concerns. In 1919, Casey “invited the Teamste...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction to the 2020 Edition
• 2015 Introduction: Troubled over Work
• Chapter 1: The Package King
• Chapter 2: Uprising in New York
• Chapter 3: The Rise of the “Quiet Giant”
• Chapter 4: UPSurge at the Tightest Ship
• Chapter 5: Air War: Taking On FedEx
• Chapter 6: Democracy Comes to the Teamsters
• Chapter 7: A War on Every Front
• Chapter 8: The Campaign to Destroy OSHA
• Chapter 9: Last, Best, and Final Offer?
• Chapter 10: Part-Time America Won’t Work
• Chapter 11: The “Get Carey” Campaign
• Chapter 12: We Love Logistics
• Conclusion: Who Will Move the World?
• Appendix 1: Do Black Lives Matter to Big Brown?
• Appendix 2: Hoffa’s Numbered Days
• Appendix 3: Logistics’ Two Fronts
• Appendix 4: James Hoffa’s Anti-Democratic UPS Catastrophe
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• Back Cover