The Teamsters, led by the reformer president Ron Carey, won an historic victory for the US labor movement in the summer of 1997 when they defeated United Parcel Service (UPS) in a two-week strike that captivated the country. Carey hailed the agreement that resulted from the strike as an “historic turning point for working people in this country. American workers have shown they can stand up to corporate greed.”

Referring to the mindset accompanying the breaking of the 1981 air traffic controllers’ strike, historian Nelson Lichtenstein wrote at the time that the UPS strike broke “the PATCO syndrome, a sixteen-year period in which a strike was synonymous with defeat and demoralization.” For many of us, the strike represented the potential for something even bigger — something like the explosion of the CIO during the Great Depression, when the US labor movement could, once again, launch big fights and win big victories.