Leave the Driving to Us

Abstract

like organized labor was making a comeback, particularly as a voice for contingent workers. As Deepa Kumar recounts in Outside The Box, 1 85,000 Teamsters went into battle against United Parcel Service (UPS) in 1997, under recently re-elected reform leadership. The result was a successful ten-day strike that protested mistreatment of part-timers not only at UPS but throughout the U.S. Still basking in the glow of his own election two years before, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney applauded the walk-out because it demonstrated the much broader appeal of unions when they defend the interests of all workers. As Sweeney noted, you could make a million house calls, run a thousand television commercials, stage a hundred strawberry rallies [for the United Farm Workers], and still not come close to doing what the UPS strike did for organizing. In 1 998, as Biju Mathew reminds us in Taxi, another group of drivers 24,000 cabbiesstaged an equally inspiring work stoppage in New York City. Theirs lasted only a day but showed that a group of independent contractors the Taxi Workers Alliance could make