On Super Bowl Sunday morning, outside a union hall in Nassau County, New York, the Teamsters had run out of parking. As members kept arriving, proper spaces filled up, and workers left their cars wherever they could — a problem for the union’s neighbor, an ambulance company, whose vehicles were now having trouble navigating the shared parking lot. Upon hearing that their cars were blocking ambulances, the offending union members trudged back to the lot to move them. When this many Teamsters are preparing for a strike, it can be tough to find a spot.

Inside the union hall, the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” blared over the speakers as some six hundred members waited for the meeting to begin. Local 804 president Vinnie Perrone, who began working at United Parcel Service (UPS) nearly thirty years ago, said he hadn’t seen a membership meeting this well attended since Ron Carey was reelected for a second term as president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT).

That was in 1996, and Carey ran as a critic of weaknesses in the UPS contract; he was backed by a coalition that included the Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), a reform caucus founded in 1976 to push for greater rank-and-file democracy within the then-mob-infested union. Carey had started out as a UPS driver in Queens and, before becoming IBT president in 1992, he served as president of Local 804. In 1997, he led the 185,000 UPS Teamsters out on a nationwide strike that lasted fifteen days before the union declared victory. The United States has not seen a strike of that magnitude since.