Reflections of an antiwar labor activist
9–11 began for me with the phone ringing off the hook. I stumbled to the phone and listened to my voicemail. It was my mother calling. “Joey, something terrible has happened. Turn on the TV.” My brain wasn’t really working but I turned on the TV and there were the twin towers of the World Trade Center billowing huge amounts of smoke. It looked like a Hollywood disaster movie.
I was dead asleep because I worked late at night at UPS in those days. I started at 6PM on the first part of my “combination full time job” picking up air packages in my van around the loop, and the second half sorting packages in the hub at Jeff. St in Chicago. I got home around 2:30 AM and was in bed an hour later. I almost always shut the ringer off before going to sleep, so my mother’s call really jarred me.
The collapse of the towers was horrific. The carnage and death that day were unprecedented in modern U.S. history. The speculation at that point was that up to 10,000 people could have been killed and untold missing. Watching the towers collapse is the worst thing I ever witnessed. I was pretty much glued to the TV set for the rest of the day and talking frantically to friends.
Bush soon declared a national emergency. It wasn’t clear if this was the first and only wave of attacks, or there were more to come. All civilian aircraft was grounded and fighter jets were deployed to the skies for the first time since WWII. Bush was shuttled around the country until he returned to Washington, DC. News accounts reported that all government buildings and private businesses were sending everyone home. The streets were soon empty.
Despite Bush’s declaration as well as human decency, UPS declared that they were still working. UPS said something idiotic like they weren’t going to let the terrorists stop them. Once again, demonstrating what a money-grubbing, big cult UPS is. I called into the air department sometime in the late afternoon, and after they made a halfhearted attempt to get me to come in, I said, “If you think I’m coming in to work tonight, you’re out of your mind.”
Since all civilian aircraft would be grounded for the next week, there were going to be no Next Day Air deliveries. The idea of going from one closed office building to another in the Loop filled with skyscrapers just seemed bizarre to me. While I was no longer doing pickups throughout the Sears Tower, I could help but think about what it would have been like to have been trapped in there if the attacks occurred in Chicago and not New York.
The next day I went to work. I can’t remember if we did our routes or just sorted in the hub, but I do remember that UPS wanted to go through with a some kind of pie eating contest for part timers. I remember being enraged and yelling at one supervisor, “What’s wrong with you people? There might be 10,000 people dead in New York, you want to do this? He looked at me like I was crazy. I took the issues of war very personally.
I remember walking around for days feeling like there was a brick on my head and a cannonball in my stomach. Everyone knew that war was coming. Most of my coworkers were more bewildered by events than bloodthirsty. Bush wasn’t very popular with many Black and Latino working class people, and in large parts of the labor movement. He was declared the winner in the 2000 presidential election by the Supreme Court despite the suppression of Black votes in Florida. He was anti-union and appointed all sorts of Neo-conservatives to his cabinet.
Over the next year and a half, those of us in the ISO who worked at UPS and active in the Teamsters talked about how to respond to the events. The U.S. invaded and occupied Afghanistan and began to prepare to invade Iraq. UPS eventually made a ton of money off the War on Terror and the invasion of Iraq. It had close ties to the Republican Party and the Bush administration. Bush was also aided by Teamster General James P. Hoffa, who joined the infamous Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, to lobby for the invasion of Iraq.
In Chicago, a small but important labor against the war campaign was coming together. I took these issues very seriously. Vietnam cast a long shadow over my family. I am proud to say that the ISO played a pretty important role in this. We were aided in this by the late Bill Davis, a long standing member of Vietnam Veterans against the War (VVAW), who was the working president of the machinists local that represented mechanics at UPS in Chicago. When George Bush visited Jeff St. in late Spring of 2002, to tout some welfare reform scam that UPS was milking — me, Leighton, and Donny leafleted (along with my late, great friend Dave Healy) to package drivers coming in with a flier attacking Bush. We didn’t catch any shit.
While we didn’t get any shit from our coworkers, I got more calls from the union hall not to do it than I ever did from them to do something against UPS. Later at the Teamsters 705 membership meeting, the Secretary-Treasurer at the time, Jerry Zero, whom I personally liked but was increasingly frustrated with, read large parts of the leaflet to the audience. And, he gave the strong impression that it was his idea. Oh, well, that’s politics.
Later in October 2002, Kieran Knudson introduced the now famous resolution against the Iraq War at the membership meeting, and it passed overwhelmingly. Teamsters 705 would soon host the founding meeting of U.S. Labor against the War. When the first Teamster died in Iraq, we publicized with a flier at Jeff St. His parents were active members of Military Families against the War.
The years following 9–11 were some of the most trying times I’ve ever lived through. I was proud of the work the ISO did in those years which couldn’t have been done without our friends and allies like Bill Davis, Dan Lane, and Kieran Knudsen. Eventually antiwar sentiment made it all the way up to the leaders of the AFL-CIO. If you told me in the days after 9–11 that that was going to happen, I would have thought you were nuts. It only goes to show that things can change quickly.
Joe Allen is author of The Package King: A Rank and File History of UPS and How to Revive the Antiwar Movement.
