WINTER 2025
ISSUE 1

₁ Editors: This piece was written in the months and weeks leading into the US presidential election on November 5, 2024.

When this comes out, we’ll be in the thick of the holiday season, or “peak season,” as it’s called in the logistics world. Gifts, Black Friday deals, trees, snacks, decorations, promotional materials, and redirected luggage – to name just a few things – will wind their way through trucks and warehouses operated by Teamster logistics workers, hustling through ten, 12, and even 16-hour workdays. We will work in snow and sleet and cold and bullshit.

By then, election season and all that comes with it will be in the rearview mirror, and the new president will be a month from assuming office.¹ Thousands of workers at UPS and other Teamsters shops engaged in the furor of election season as their union’s president, Sean O’Brien, drew them into the spotlight with his infamous speech at the Republican National Convention – a keynote that launched a thousand think pieces.

Unions may be shrinking but there’s a renewed militancy afoot. All of a sudden, endorsements from blue-collar workers and their organizations are coveted in a neck-and-neck political contest. Everyone scrambled to understand what it meant that one public face of this militancy was flirting with the most reactionary party in the race. Some considered it a sell-out of the membership or the wider movement. Many others saw it as accurately representing the secret will of the mass of workers, a “silent majority” of us.

Life on the job doesn’t look anything like this. Most workers didn’t bother with union polls and discussions surrounding the endorsement of a presidential candidate. The workers I know and observed have significant differences in how they talk to one another or interact with the union. This depends on whether they spend time in the union hall or what other workplace associations they have and how they navigate online and shop floor networks.

These spaces and exchanges reveal little about which presidential candidate could sway working-class voters to their side or whose program is better designed for “blue-collar interests.” They say much more about how layered sets of relationships inside the union and on the job actually politicize and move us to action. These are the political lessons we should look to from this election, which made so much of labor issues and “the working class” but had so little to do with the everyday lives of workers. 

—

At 3am on the morning after O’Brien’s Republican National Convention speech, I stumbled into the Midwest UPS warehouse where I work. I’m on the “pre-load” shift, moving packages from trailers to package cars – the big, brown trucks that the UPS brand is built around. Everything has to be loaded by about 9am so that drivers can get on the road. The company retains control over the “flexibility” of shifts, so the start time is adjusted earlier or later based on the volume of packages.

I made my way to the cafeteria to sip on a dollar-store energy drink and eat a honeybun while taking in whatever gossip I could. The inside of the warehouse is like an M.C. Escher illusion: caked in a dust of unknown origin, the east end crowded with three stories of conveyor belts and metal slides winding and crisscrossing, ascending from foot-level to far overhead. On the ground, the belt system creates a series of narrow tunnels and coves under platforms. I wave at workers I pass, some finishing the “sunrise” shift – loading trailers full of packages that were picked up the previous day – while the few full-time warehouse workers take advantage of the slow time to move in relative peace.

When I finally get to the mess hall, there’s a familiar scene. At one end, an older package car loader is holding forth about how the company is headed for the shitter. “They hire all these new people and promote them to manager after less than a year when they don’t know a damn thing about how the facility works,” he explains. 

“They’re running around like chickens with their heads cut off, moving people from this area to that area to speed things up. They never trained anybody to do the job right in the first place. When I started, you had to know where each address was so you made sure things ended up in the right place. You had to take a test. Now, the only thing people know is a color or number. ‘Aqua.’ ‘3108.’ People here might be damn near illiterate. The line moves so fast they can’t even get the damn package in the right place, and it all ends up back here to get resorted the next day. They call that efficiency? Seems like nobody cares as long as it goes on a truck. We got whole trucks full of stuff that went to the wrong place.”

This sort of thing always inspires conversation, and before long, the takes are rolling off the line. Today, I’m just around to listen. Glancing at my honeybun wrapper, I think about the breakfast I’d make if I were getting to work at 9am instead of 3. Although the mess hall has a fully operable kitchen, it’s only in use a couple times a year. If people don’t bring their own food, they have to make do with the “market,” which is basically an airport-style snack kiosk that replaced some vending machines six months ago. This was part of a “renovation” that we quickly discerned was a scam. The “market” nearly doubled the prices of the old vending machines. Still, the mess hall has the benefit of being one of the few places without thrumming machine noise, meaning it’s the best place in the building to have a real conversation. It’s also the best place to sleep, an unfortunate necessity for those of us who take the bus to work. After years of belt-tightening by the city, public transit doesn’t run most places overnight. Some folks have two or three late hours to kill before work starts up. 

When they “turn the building on,” an orchestra from hell starts up, playing a kind of industrial free jazz, with the cacophonic thumping of rollers, clacking of gears, hiss of motors, and the demon screech of some unlubricated pieces of metal grinding against another. The noise tells me it’s time to walk to my work area, and while I wander over, I remember how Coltrane worked in a mill when he got to Philadelphia. 

I’m assigned to a truck bay by a supervisor. I walk over to sit on the “extend-o,” a 12-foot tall conveyor belt contraption that unloaders guide into the trailer with a joystick. A work buddy sees me and steps up to the ladder to chat. He’s a 30-year-old Black guy with a wife, a kid he takes to school in the morning after the pre-load shift, and a car that’s always got problems he doesn’t have the money to fix. “They got you with me? That’s a surprise.” We’ve bonded recently, kvetching about supervisor retaliation we’ve received. We’re both vocal about enforcing the union contract, so supervisors usually keep us separated. 

“Nah, they tried to put me over at Bay 30 with that broken equipment again, but you know I’m not doing that. I’m not getting hurt over these packages,” he tells me.

“Hell yeah. Stay safe. They can find you someplace else to work. They shouldn’t even be putting a truck in that bay,” I say.

We chat, and I ask him if he saw O’Brien’s speech, expressing some of my own trepidation. 

“Hmm. You think O’Brien knows something we don’t? No way Biden is going to win. Sounds like it’s time to buckle up for another four years of Trump. Ride it out.”

I shrug, not having any better ideas. As we split up and I stepped into the trailer, I kept thinking how much my coworker, a real fighter, seemed more or less disinterested in the Beltway spectacle. 

—

Throughout the shift, I ask a few more people the same question. Ninety percent of my coworkers in the unload area didn’t know the speech took place. Newer guys don’t know who the union president is. That’s not necessarily surprising. Most people working inside the warehouse don’t talk about election news. When I want to start up a conversation, it’s usually about food, work, family, basketball, music, anime, the weather, football, or our union contract – and in that order.

Those who did see the speech assumed that O’Brien had good intentions. 

One bulk package worker – a Hispanic guy who lives across state lines and drives an hour to work in order to avoid the higher property taxes – beat me to the punch. Did I see the speech?

“I did, yeah. Was it weird that it was the RNC?”

“Eh, maybe, but whatever. He had the best speech of the night. They didn’t want to hear it, but he stuck to it.” 

He’s an enthusiastic booster for the union, at least on a one-to-one basis. He won a grievance that saved him from being fired after being accused of “stealing time.” When I got transferred to the “twilight” shift, he taught me how to survive the pre-load. He even got me a gig at a moving company to make extra cash during the low-volume summer season.

In contrast to my friend with the difficult car, who is newer and has an antagonistic relationship to both management and the shop steward, but still finds smart ways of manipulating the structure of the union to get what he needs, this guy is thoroughly integrated in the local. He’s worked his way up through it to a position of seniority with good hours, and so for him it’s just good to be union.

Later in the week, package car drivers gathered on the other side of the building for the short weekly meeting that the stewards have been hosting for years. In contrast to the unloaders on the other end of the building, almost all of these drivers heard about the speech, and at least half had watched all of it. The political culture of the drivers in this barn can feel like it’s a world away from the warehouse or even teams of drivers in other shops. This crew has a number of activist stewards and rank and filers who have taken years to pull together a communication network – no small feat when drivers basically spend all day alone, driving on a tight schedule. While the desirable “career” prospects of their job helps with building this, the actual structure of the job can be less conducive to organizing than the floor of the warehouse, where at least everyone’s together all day. In any case, before the RNC even showed up on our television screens, these drivers had already been talking about the endorsement in meetings like this and also in text chats, on conference calls from the road, and at breakfasts before their shift.

Some said O’Brien had given a good speech and stuck up for unions. Others said it was a bad look, being on stage with these scabs terrorizing immigrants and trans folks. The whole thing was friendly, no grandstanding, with most people cracking jokes. “Take your pick: the crook or the crypt keeper,” got a big laugh.

The sentiments at work that week underlined a feeling that the fervor of media attention couldn’t capture. Real politics – the collective actions taken daily to win control of life on and off the job – rarely happens in front of cameras. Despite the sadists shouting “MAGA” and “class traitor” into a digital void, most Teamsters I know recognized the spectacle was barely worth the distracted chat we gave it on the shop floor.

—

Over the summer, Teamsters gathered in local meeting halls across the country for presidential town halls in which over 12,000 members weighed in on the union endorsement of a US presidential nominee.

The whole process is a novel development for the IBT (International Brotherhood of Teamsters). On the one hand, it was a gesture to the reform wing of a coalition that put O’Brien in office in place of the longstanding Hoffa Jr. regime. O’Brien’s administration points to the effort as yet another uptick in membership engagement following a “historic” process – a bonafide sea change in the relationship between membership and the top administrators of the union, or so we were told. Regardless, the process was still a top-down affair, leaving the ultimate power of endorsement in the hands of the union president.

I showed up late to the town hall my local hosted, frustrated with myself for missing the start. Coming from Georgia, local meetings remind me most of church, where informal talks before and after service are just as important as the sermon. Our union congregation is scattered all over the city, the suburbs, and even into a couple of border states. Taking the monthly pilgrimage to the hall is one of the only ways to see people from all over the local, and chatting in the parking lot is an important way that information gets disseminated to the members most active in the life of the union, and then onward to the shop floor.

When I walked in, a business agent I’d met the previous year while helping with a baseball game outing and a strike authorization vote handed me an info card that outlined the positions of each candidate on Teamsters issues, things like right to work, automation, and support for new organizing.

To my surprise, the hall was just as crowded as I’d seen it in the lead-up to potential strikes. Looking around, I saw dozens of unfamiliar faces scattered among the usual mix of stewards and union activist regulars. When I got to a seat, I realized few people were sitting in their usual location and had instead scattered themselves among members from other facilities, listening intently but also scanning the room to take in the reactions of those around them. This was a departure from the usual union meeting cadence, where reports from officers take up the bulk of the agenda and almost all attention is set on the podium at the front of the hall. Even during the “good and welfare” portion of a normal meeting, where members make comments or express grievances they want people to hear, the eyes of the crowd are as much on the officers – to judge their response – as on the speakers.

This new, improvised choreography, where the top officers of the union took a back seat to the proceeding, changed the tone. In this format, members were either elevated or hung out by the reactions of the crowd. From past experience, many of the active, senior members knew what they needed to do to move momentum in the hall. Let the most visible activists – the people who are always helping out on picket lines, at strike votes, cookouts, trainings, gate flyering, and campaigning for a leadership slate – make a short and sweet point at the mic and make sure there’s a roar of applause and whooping when they wrap up. When someone makes a contrary point, politely pat your leg or golf clap. There’s no need to be rude or make anyone feel bad. Just drive the message home. In this way, the crowd leaned heavily in favor of endorsing Joe Biden. Speakers touted his bona fides as “the only sitting president to walk a picket line,” the administration that “rescued pension funds” in the wake of the COVID pandemic, and the team that appointed a friendlier National Labor Relations Board, opening space for a wave of successful union affiliation elections, most visibly significant in the fight to unionize Amazon. 

Most contrary voices did not speak in favor of the former Republican president, but instead spoke against endorsing any candidate, decrying past sleights by Democratic administrations, like the deregulation of trucking by the Carter administration, Clinton’s ratification of the North American Free Trade Agreement, and Biden’s breaking of a potential rail strike. Some members used the mic to propose things off the voting card. A couple brothers said we need a new working-class party to break out of the American two-party system. The suggestion was met with polite applause. One sister suggested IBT members mobilize to protest the RNC in nearby Milwaukee, and a few members lined up on the side of the hall for more details. 

Not everyone was caught up in the spirit of democracy. I asked one brother sitting next to me, who had been quiet throughout the process, what he thought.

“Seems like a waste of time and money to me,” he said. “We elect officers to deal with this kind of stuff.”

Following the speeches, the local took a vote by secret ballot, which was counted at the front of the hall in full view of the members. The final tally was over 150 for Biden and fewer than 10 for Trump – a decisive result from the two percent of our local that turned out.  

After the vote, I met a group of socialist Teamsters who circled up in the back of the hall. We often catch up after these meetings over lunch at a nearby burger spot. We didn’t reflect much on the poll. What more was there to say? 

“You just started driving?” one brother asks me. 

“Yeah, I got pulled in to do seasonal.” 

“How’s it been?”

“Amazing. I finally don’t have to work two or three jobs. I’m sleeping a lot better. I get to see the sunlight. I’m catching up on bills. I’m hoping it works out.”

“Hell yeah. Good luck, man.” 

Throughout the following weeks, activist union siblings in other participating locals shared their own results by text message. This network, a loose collection of members that met through Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), initially indicated mixed results. Local 89 in Kentucky went 88-25 for Biden. Locals 804 and 817, headquartered in Long Island, went 103-64 for Trump and 95-86 for Biden, respectively. Local 162 in Portland, Oregon went 33-32 for Biden. Unable to cast a wider net for gathering poll results from locals, we couldn’t discern much of a pattern.

—

As election day drew nearer, labor punditry cliques and some activist members took any trickle of news as an opportunity to augur the international leadership’s endorsement. IBT President Sean O’Brien attracted increasing media attention, especially in meetings with former president Donald Trump, which were used as photo ops for the latter’s shallow claim of representing “the working class.” In a New York Times article, IBT Vice President-at-Large John Palmer revealed the results of the town halls at the time had Biden over Trump, 46 percent to 37 percent. But then, after reaching out to both parties, O’Brien accepted a primetime speaking slot at the Republican National Convention. The spectacle led to an uproar among labor partisans, with reactions rooted in the public persona O’Brien had curated during the contract battle between UPS and the Teamsters more than in any reality of life inside the union.

The media attention O’Brien ginned up to bolster the IBT in the UPS fight has imagineered the “average” Teamster as a sort of “bellwether worker” (and not for the first time). The moods and movements of rank-and-file members were mostly lost in this coverage. If all eyes were on the Teamsters, what exactly were they looking at?

A group of Teamsters, developed in part through the Labor Notes convention, began to coalesce as Teamsters Against Trump. They raised opposition through a collection of op-eds circulated online to gauge support for some kind of coordinated national campaign. Simultaneously, a network of Trump supporters in the union that formed in 2016, Teamsters For Trump, quietly circulated an online poll initially distributed – really, buried – as a QR code on the back of an election-themed summer issue of Teamster Magazine. Groups for and against Trump spent the next months attempting to mobilize what they thought was a silent majority of supporters for their side, making moves to put pressure on leadership at every level of the union. 

In the middle of the polling period, Biden dropped out of the race. Kamala Harris quickly pulled together the endorsement of the Democratic Party ahead of its national convention. 

In a surprising move, the Teamsters National Black Caucus endorsed Kamala Harris, without waiting for an endorsement decision from the international leadership. Harris, in turn, brought a group of two dozen Teamsters out on stage at the DNC in Chicago. Teamsters Against Trump partisans started passing out flyers at the gates in a few Midwest states, encouraging members to vote for Harris in the online poll, but they’d already fallen far behind.  

Votes from over 35,000 members were tallied in the electronic poll. That’s about 2.5 percent of our membership, only marginally improving on the rate of participation in our union town halls. Trump captured 59.6 percent of votes cast in the electronic poll, while Harris had 34 percent. The Trump campaign, and media affiliates around the country, pointed to the result as an effective endorsement from the union rank and file. In reality, neither side was able to generate significant enthusiasm or activity among members – likely less than three percent of Teamsters’ roughly 1.3 million members participated in the process in any way. 

After all the jockeying, an official announcement came on September 18. O’Brien and the General Executive Board of the IBT did not endorse any candidate in the presidential race, citing inconclusive results. The decision passed the authority to endorse candidates to the leaders of joint councils, who, in turn, quickly lined up behind Harris.  

The union also released 400 pages of polling data that pointed to some interesting internal dynamics. In the town halls, Biden outpolled Trump in 36 out of 50 states. The states where Trump polled better than Biden don’t fit the typical presidential election map: Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, New Hampshire, New York, North Dakota, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia. At the joint council and local levels, the results were more mixed. Of 31 joint councils reporting town hall data, Biden polled better than Trump at 19. At the local level, Biden won 172 of the town halls, and Trump won 101. They tied in 10. Regardless of the geographic area or level, Biden generally polled better at in-person town halls than he did through electronic polling. 

The results show, for one, that local leaders and the networks they’ve developed among long-time members are the biggest drivers of results in the town hall process. Cliques of Trump supporters who were not showing up at the union hall were driving results in the electronic poll. So, members active in the social life around the union hall were more likely to favor a Democratic or third-party candidate, even when they were in the minority locally.

Electoral activists, whether for or against Trump, deployed similar tactics. They mobilized members with political affinity to take a specific action (e.g., attend a town hall or vote in the electronic poll), they publicized the results, and then pointed back to the publicity to pressure the top union leaders to do something on our behalf. 

The whole cycle poses important questions. For one, if the social network extending from the union hall is such a powerful force in members’ activity, how do we dig into and utilize that? For members who aren’t engaging with the union hall, how can we extend that social network to reach them? If members aren’t engaging in electoral politics through the union, even when they engage in other fronts of union activity – and to be clear, that is the case for the vast majority of Teamsters – where does that direct us?

—

I got to enjoy my time driving a package car for two more weeks before I got busted back into the warehouse. It was a revelatory experience. 

On my first full day of driving, I got my “browns,” the uniform for package car drivers that’s as much a part of the UPS brand as the boxy brown trucks. When I walked into a circle of drivers gathered before the daily pre-shift meeting, or PCM, one older guy looked me up and down. 

“First day?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“Don’t worry too much. Your first day will be pretty short. Tomorrow, bring a lunch. Come early so you can re-sort your truck, and make sure you grab extra water. You’ll be fine. It’s all about habits,” he told me.

“Will do, thanks.” I asked his name, made a mental note, and shuffled to the front to appear attentive for the managers watching.

I was surprised. On my first day in the warehouse, nobody but a supervisor talked to me, and for weeks afterward, people rarely gave me the time of day. It seemed like the assumption was that new people just weren’t going to last long; investing us with attention just wasn’t worth the time. 

The next day, I did what the older guy had said. I had my chicken salad packed, got in early to find my truck, and got the packages for my first bunch of stops memorized. When I walked over for the PCM, another guy looked me up and down. 

“First day?” he asked.

“Second.”

“Ah, what route you got?”

“This nursery route. It’s a big block of residential stops off a state highway.” 

“Let’s look at it,” he said, walking me over to the desktop computers where people check the details of the stops they’re assigned. “Okay, so the way they have you doing the route is you’re starting in this strip mall and then going right into the residential area. If you do it their way, you’ll end up all the way in the back of this subdivision, and around rush hour, you’re gonna be coming back to this highway over and over, waiting to make a turn in traffic. Instead, what you want to do is get everything off this highway knocked out, then work your way from the back corner of the route up to the front. That way, you can just jet back to the building and head home. You got kids?”

“No.”

“A wife?”

“Girlfriend. Four years now.”

“Four years? And you didn’t get married or have kids? More power to you, man, that’s patient.”

“Haha, I guess. I think it’s lack of money as much as patience.” 

“HA! I got you, bro. You be safe out there.” 

“You too. Thanks for the tip.” 

The next few weeks progressed like that. Every day another driver spotting me as one of the new guys would ask me how things were going, give me some tip (get lighter boots, just put lemons in your water instead of bothering with Gatorade, be careful with spray-on sunscreen in the hot truck), ask something about me, or crack a joke, and then we’d get out to work. As I met more people, they’d recognize me each morning and bring me more into the crew – part of the culture that had been established in this barn over the course of years, where drivers took the brief opportunities before they started off on their route to get to know each other, talk, and build a community. 

For sure, the job had its downsides. Temperatures were in the 90s. I was sweating constantly and always on guard about getting sunburnt. It was still very physical work, almost constantly moving, either doing a delivery or keeping the truck organized. Supervisors would follow me for stretches of my route, tailgating me in a car, and then give me some new thing to focus on. But for me, the upsides vastly outweighed the down. 

Every three days, I’d have a ride-along with a supervisor. Most were glowing about my work. One was hyper-particular and always talking, which made me anxious. One morning, he was asking me questions on the way back from a delivery, and I flubbed a startup routine. Trying to seem confident, I was moving quickly and accidentally put the car in neutral instead of drive. When I touched the gas, the engine revved loudly, but the car didn’t move. 

“Are you okay,” he asked, looking at me like I was drunk and needed to hand over my keys. 

“Yeah. I was just trying to move through the routine and moved too quickly when we were talking.”

The next week, I parked the truck in a tight, busy parking lot to make deliveries to some shops in a busy six-way intersection. Managers took me to the side after I delivered my packages and started questioning me about why I’d parked where I did. I explained myself, and they seemed to follow my reasoning. But a few hours later, a supervisor met me at a stop to drive the rest of my route. 

The next day I wasn’t driving. I’d be riding along with a more senior driver. He was an ex-military guy who loves big events. He regaled me with stories about seeing Post Malone at a big stadium show and going to a rodeo in the suburbs. His route had a massive number of packages, but he loved it. We made our first delivery at a breakfast place that gave us free coffee and sandwiches. His kids’ school was on the route, so on breaks, we brought them snacks and food and enjoyed the AC. In the afternoon, we met his wife when she was grabbing the kids. 

After the weekend, I still didn’t have a route. I got brought into the office and was told that I was getting bumped back into the warehouse that day. 

—

The Tuesday morning I got back in the warehouse, people told me that they missed seeing me around. The supervisors had been on one for the last month, and folks were trying to figure out how to push back. Nobody mentioned anything about endorsements.

Everyone was worried about the upcoming high season. Some high-seniority workers had dug into someone new, asking why he let this asshole supervisor walk all over him. Sometimes these new guys would ask why the veterans cared so much: it’s because what you put up with truly sets the tone. It was fall now, which meant a steady clip of greener hires. If the latest cohort saw someone getting messed with and accepting it, they’d assume that’s how things run, and they wouldn’t speak up either. Everyone – old heads most of all – were invested in holding the line.

In the warehouse, this was how the more senior members would move. A recommendation to go to the union was rare. Their first point was sticking up for yourself. If you wouldn’t, they didn’t see much need to help further. If you did, they’d recommend other pressure points that they see as more expedient before turning to the union. These might be corporate channels, like an anonymous ethics hotline complaint. It might be a state channel, like an OSHA report or ADA complaint. If those don’t have results, talking to someone in the union would be the next resort. Often a steward will try to mediate a solution without the paperwork of a grievance. Some members demand a grievance be filed. Or, it’ll be a sly direct action. 

When I was on twilight shift, I’d been moved to “small sort” because I sprained my ankle at work. I was getting my hours cut back after an argument with a supervisor. One Wednesday, when the supervisor told me I’d be cut from my shift without work, the steward intervened.

He yelled to one of the other senior members, “Hey, you feel like working today?”

“No! The game is on. I’d love to go home.”

The supervisor said they needed the senior coworker to stay. 

“Doesn’t matter,” the steward said.  “You’ve gotta go in seniority order. If he wants to go home, then the young guy can stay.”

The supervisor didn’t protest anymore that day, and I got to work a shift. The next week, the situation escalated. The supervisor tried to cut me plus four more people from the shift who she knew needed their hours, trying to divide the room. The steward grabbed the schedule for the week, which doubles as the seniority list. “No no no,” he said. “It has to go in seniority order.” 

The supervisor didn’t back down. “Alright,” she said, and proceeded to call for the least senior people – still four people plus me. “The union says I have to cut all of ya.”

The people losing their shifts start to complain, but the steward butts in. He calls over four other high-seniority coworkers, and asks, “You want to work today? I’m going home.”

Picking up what he’s putting down, they all say that they’ll go home, too. 

Among these senior members is a family man who told me the billionaire owner of the local baseball team built the stadium “with his own two hands,” a woman who bemoaned the “gangsters” in the neighborhood she left for the suburbs, and a church deacon that voted for Trump because he is “Solomon reborn.”

The supervisor, realizing she’d gotten outplayed, and not wanting to work a crew of mostly untested or injured workers, backed down. “Alright, I’m not doing this today,” she sighed. We all worked the shift. 

The steward who stepped in, a small-time landlord who took vacations to the Caribbean more often than he went to meetings at the hall, constantly criticized the union grievance process. The workers on the shift had built a network over decades, rotating buying cheaper cigarettes from across county lines and dinners from local restaurants before shifts. They had bar nights across the city. They told back-in-the-day stories amongst each other and anyone willing to listen. They fought over what was being played on the radio that was always blasting over the sounds of the warehouse.

This is the culture and history that these workers drew upon in confronting management. It’s impossible to see when we focus only on how politicians and union leaders talk about workers. It often escapes the view of organizers who are focused on turning workers out to polls, either at the union hall or online, where action plans ultimately terminate in the hands of union leadership, and in public declarations broadcast to audiences far removed from the workers themselves. If there’s going to be a political line to march from inside the workplace to the wider world without, it will develop out of these informal relationships and collective actions on the shop floor, not from allegiance to one or another leader.