U.S. JOURNAL: THE TOTAL PACKAGE

UPS offers old-fashioned middle-class jobs, so why is a strike looming?

- JENNIFER GONNERMAN

For nearly twenty years, Antoine Andrews has been driving a UPS route in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bay Ridge. When he rings the bell of a house one afternoon, the customer greets him with a fist bump: “What’s up, bro?” When he drops off a package at Walgreens, he recognizes an elderly man in the checkout line. The man once worked in a neighborhood bar, and when Andrews used to walk in with a delivery the man always offered him a beer— “On the house!”—which Andrews would decline. As he walks out of Walgreens, he taps the man on the shoulder and says, “Nice to see you!” All day long, Andrews waves to people he knows, and they wave back. He later jokes that, when he’s on his route, “I feel like I’m running for office, like I’m on the podium and I’m waving with both hands.”

Andrews is forty-six years old, slim and bald, with a salt-and-pepper beard, which is fairly new, because, until 2020, UPS prohibited its drivers from having beards. Before his workday ends, he has to deliver—or attempt to deliver—each of the hundred and forty parcels in the back of his package car. Hour after hour, he does the dance of the UPS driver: driving a block or two, turning off the ignition, unbuckling his seat belt, pulling in his side view mirror, searching in the back for parcels, climbing out, delivering them to customers. He has delivered just about everything, from dog food to exercise bicycles to fake Christmas trees. Another driver might have grown tired of this job, but Andrews has not. “I take pride in servicing my customers,” he told me, “and my customers and I have a great relationship.”