If I remember right it was labor issues that shut down the predesor of UPS the Railroad Expess Agency… Railroads are a animal of there own and should have there own union.
Railroad Unions including the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen (BLET) and the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees (BMWE) have already merged with the Teamsters, so your point is moot.
LC
Also the Transportation Communications International Union (formerly the Brotherhood of Railway & Airline Clerks and a host of predecessor unions) is now part of the International Association of Machinists.
Athough I’m a firm believer of the “Work Union - Learn Chinese” school of thought, the unions did not kill off REA. The regulated environment in the trucking industry prior to 1980 did in REA - it was doomed by regulatory decisions prohibiting them from purchasing direct trucking rights in the mid-1960’s. Their costs were at least 25% higher than those of even unionized truckers, and REA had no way to cut them.
Railroads are NOT an animal of their own - they’re in the transportation business, right alongside Fedex, APL, JB Hunt, Yellow Freight,Williams Pipeline, and any farm boy in Iowa who (paraphrasing John Kneiling) can scrape together the down payment for a Peterbilt conventional, a Rand-McNally road atlas, and a case of Red Bull. Shippers don’t give a hoot if you use a 747, an SD70, a Mack, or a rickshaw - they want service reliability at a cost acceptable to them. Whoever provides the right combination will survive - those who can’t will not, sooner or later.
United Parcel Service is hardly the successor to the Railway Express Agency. UPS prior to de-reg was a relatively small carrier that had been around for a long time.
Union mergers have occurred over the years, although they were less frequent in the past.
REA was done in by the shananagins of it’s management. Think Enron and Worldcom.
The BLE merged with the Teamsters, because the BLE was broke. It’s battle to fend off the UTU, left it crippled finanically, and it needed to merge with someone (other then the UTU) to survive. The Teamsters, after failing to organize Overnight, were looking to score any sort of labor victory.
Nick