Category: UPS News

With 1.3 million members, the Teamsters are the largest transportation union in North America. As the US economy continues to reshape itself around the sprawling logistics industry, whoever is elected the next Teamster leader will face the daunting task of organizing this vast, nonunion workforce — one that will determine much of the future of the labor movement.

Teamsters will make that decision this October, in an election contest that pits the seventeen-year incumbent general president James P. Hoffa against challenger Fred Zuckerman, the president of the fifteen-thousand-member Teamsters Local 89 in Louisville, Kentucky, and his Teamsters United reform slate.

Baird analyst Benjamin Hartford says all leading trucking companies are experimenting with autonomous truck technology.

“UPS would be the most logical. I know they have looked at the possibility,” Hartford told IBD.

UPS already employs driver-assistance systems on many trucks, but says full autonomy is further off, with regulation being a key issue.

Truck drivers are in short supply now, and self-driving trucks would fill that gap. But if large numbers of self-driving trucks roll out — with no human in the cab — Teamsters and other unions would likely resist.