America Is Drowning in Packages
UPS workers have an impossible job in the Amazon age.
When UPS delivery workers last went on strike, in 1997, the nature of their job was very different. Amazon, then merely an online bookstore, was barely two years out from its very first sale. Buying jeans, or new furniture, or really anything, still required most people to get in their car and head to the local mall. By the time the International Brotherhood of Teamsters announced on Tuesday that it had reached a tentative agreement with UPS that would avoid a strike and keep hundreds of thousands of union members on the job, those workers’ role in American life had changed fundamentally.
