Working at UPS During 9–11 and After: Looking Back 25 Years Later

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 mother lived in our hometown of Stoughton, Massachusetts and was watching the morning news programs when it was announced that the north tower of the World Trade Center (WTC) was hit by an air plane. It wasn’t clear at first whether this was an accident or not. But, sixteen minutes later, when the south tower was hit by another plane it was clear that these weren’t accidents, but a coordinated attack.

My brain wasn’t really working, but I turned on the TV and both towers of the World Trade Center (WTC) were billowing huge amounts of smoke. It looked like a Hollywood disaster movie. The Twin Towers were iconic symbols of the New York skyline and used as the backdrop to countless feature films and television shows. They were familiar to people around the globe.

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 carnage and death that day were unprecedented in modern U.S. history. The speculation during the days that followed was that potentially up to 10,000 people could have been killed and untold missing. (The final list of victims from the Twin Towers was 2,977. ) Frantic last calls were made by passengers on highjacked planes and from the Twin Towers. In many cases they could only leave messages on answering machine. After the towers collapsed, cell phones, the internet, and landlines were down, which made contacting friends and family impossible.

Watching the towers collapse is the worst thing I ever witnessed. The thought of people dyeing in the violent impact of the two planes, collapsing floors and concrete, or burned to death with jet fuel was horrifying. We only learned later of the terrible fate of the fireman who entered the towers to rescue those injured or trapped in their offices many dozens of stories above the streets. I was pretty much glued to the TV for the rest of the day, while talking frantically to friends speculating in panic mode about what was going to happen next.

President George W. Bush 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. and addressed the nation that evening from the oval office. News accounts reported that all government buildings and private businesses were sending everyone home. The streets were soon empty.

Despite Bush’s declaration, 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 (NDA) 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 couldn’t 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. My old friend, and former UPSer, Danny Katch wrote about his experince of surviving the 9–11 attacks in lower Manhattan. Danny’s UPS supervisor demanded that they stay in place. “If you leave, turn over your ID, because you’re not coming back.” They left.

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. UPS engaged in alll sorts of “company spirit” antics to keep part-timers on the jobs. 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, and you want to do this?” He looked at me like I was crazy. I took the issues of war and their consequences 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. Bush “won” the election with a minority of popular vote against Al Gore, the sitting vice-president, and viewed as illegitimate by large parts of the electorate, as Trump would be 2016. Bush was anti-unionand appointed all sorts of neo-conservatives to his cabinet. Before Trump, Bush was seen as one of the most anti-working class presidents in U.S. history, on par with Ronald Reagan.

Yet, despite Bush’s unpopularity with many people before 9–11, the crisis suddenly gave him the cache of now being a “war-time” president. The population rallied around the president helped by the mainstream media, and the anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism and bigotry already embraced by large numbers of Americans. Xenophobia and racism skyrocketed over the next year. It was impossible to have rational discussions about the “blowback” of U.S. foreign policy while the hunt for Osama Bin-Laden and Al-Quieda was on. Antiwar activism was marginal to irrelevant. It was only when Bush’s war planner shifted towards Iraq that antiwar began to resurface.

Over the next year and a half, those of us in the International Socialist Organization (ISO), which I was a member of for four decades, and worked at UPS and active in the Teamsters talked about how to respond to the events. The U.S. soon after 9–11 invaded and occupied Afghanistan and began to prepare to invade Iraq, which seemed to be the whole point of the “Global War on Terror.” UPS eventually made a ton of money off the war. UPS had close ties to the Republican Party and the Bush administration. Bush was also aided by Teamster General James P. Hoffa, who joined the infamousCommittee 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 President George Bush visited our UPS hub at 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 friend Dave Healy) to package drivers coming into work with a flier attacking Bush’s record. We didn’t catch any shit from anyone.

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, the late Jerry Zero, whom I personally liked but was increasingly frustrated with, read large parts of the leaflet to the audience. He gave the strong impression that it was his idea. Oh, well, that’s politics. Later in October 2002, UPS part-timer Kieran Knutson, introduced the nowfamous resolution against the Iraq War at the membership meeting. It passed overwhelmingly. It was later included in Howard Zinn’s Voices of a People’s History of the United States.

Teamsters 705, which at the time was the second largest Teamsters local union in the country, would soon host two important meetings for the future of labor antiwar activism in the coming years. On January 10, 2003, Voices Against the War: Union Activists and Veterans Speak Out Against the War Drive on Iraq. The speakers included Bill Davis, a leader in Vietnam Veteran against the War and a shop steward for the machinists union at UPS, and Dane Lane, also a Vietnam Veteran, who became well know as a “Road Warrior” during the Staley Lockout in the mid-1990s. The panel was round out by Trent Willis, a representative of west coast International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILGWU) and Brenda Stokeley, an AFCSME president from New York and a co-covenor New York City Labor against the War. The meeting led to the formation of Chicago Labor Against the War (CLAW).

The following day on January 11, Teamsters 705 hosted the founding convention of U.S. Labor against the War. It was the most significant anti-war formation since the latter years of the Vietnam War. When the first Teamster died in Iraq, we publicized it with a mass fliering 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 Knutson, who has remained active in the Twin Cities’ labor movement as a Local CWA president and in the resistance to ICE. Eventually antiwar sentiment made it all the way up to the leaders of the AFL-CIO. In June 2005, the AFL-CIO passed a resolution that called for the “rapid withdrawal” of U.S. forces from Iraq. If you told me in the days after 9–11 that that was going to happen, I would have thought you were nuts. It goes to show how quickly things can change.

Joe Allen is the author of Teamsterland: Reports on America’s Most Iconic Union and The Package King: A Rank and File History of UPS. He lives in Chicago.