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.

Zuckerman’s local is one of the largest Teamster locals in the country and represents eight thousand workers at the United Parcel Service’s mammoth air hub “Worldport,” where hundreds of daily flights take off to deliver packages to 220 countries around the globe.