Rank-and-file reaction to the October 5 vote count on the two proposed national contracts between the Teamsters and United Parcel Service (UPS) quickly went from elation to confusion to raw fury in a few minutes.

The vote count was carried live on a nationwide conference call and online. It was presided over by Ed Hartfield, the Teamsters election supervisor, and Denis Taylor, the Teamsters chief negotiator for UPS.

In a ceremony reminiscent of a state lottery, the results showed that the UPS National Master Agreement, the larger of the two covering 260,000 workers, was rejected by 55 percent of the members who voted, while the UPS Freight contract, covering about twenty thousand workers, was rejected by an even greater number, 63 percent. (Slightly less than half of all UPS Teamsters voted.)