If “bleeding brown blood” sounds a little cult-like to you, you’re not alone. When UPS tried to export this “Big Idea” to the rest of the world, it suffered what Niemann calls a “rude awakening.” In the mid-1970s, UPS opened up its delivery operations in West Germany:

The work ethic in 1970s Germany was not the fine-tuned Swiss watch the UPS pioneers anticipated. The country’s labor climate was institutionalized by German laws that called for extended vacations, much time off, liberal unlimited sick day policies, short work hours and weeks, and other inflexibilities. The hourly employees listened to the stress and pressure to get the job done as if it were Greek. According to Gale Davis, member of the initial start-up team and later German region personnel manager, “Most Germans felt that a better way to handle excessive work loads was to hire more and more people.” Like most Europeans, the German population didn’t even consider the concept of “living to work”; they worked only to live and strived to work as little as possible. You can imagine how this lassitude and lack of commitment struck UPS managers who lived and breathed “brown.”

As early as 1916, Jim Casey, the founder of UPS, approached the Teamsters about representing his workforce when it was still a bicycle messenger service based in Seattle. Niemann recognized that Seattle was “a haven for left-wing politics” where activists called “for the emancipation of the working class from the ‘slave bondage of capitalism.’” Niemann believes Casey’s willingness to allow his workforce to be represented by the conservative Teamsters came out of his “family” approach to business. But isn’t the obvious answer that Casey hoped to preempt his workforce from joining more radical unions or unions with more militant leaderships? In the 1930s, Casey cut a deal with West Coast Teamster leader Dave Beck to represent UPS drivers and warehouse workers. Beck was a firm believer in “business unionism” and hostile to rank-and-file control of the unions. “Unions are big business,” Beck once declared. “Why should truck drivers and bottle washers be allowed to make big decisions affecting union policy? Would any corporation allow it?” Casey would have agreed.

“Over the last eighty-eight years, the Teamster-UPS relationship has been mostly positive, with some exceptions,” according to Niemann. The positive side of things for UPS has been the pioneering of part-time work with Teamsters’ approval. Today, over two-thirds of UPS’s 210,000 unionized workers are part-time with starting pay remaining the same as it has—$8.00 or $8.50 an hour—since the early 1980s. The UPS empire has been built on the destruction of full-time jobs. The exception to this cozy relationship was during the years under the Teamsters reform leader Ron Carey, a former UPS driver, described by Niemann as a “disenchanted former UPS driver” who had “taken over the Teamsters union in the nineties and vowed ‘to get’ UPS.” Niemann conveniently forgets that Carey was the first Teamster general president ever elected by the rank-and-file of the union, unlike other UPS-friendly Teamsters leaders. The 1997 strike against UPS, called by Carey and supported by the vast majority of UPS Teamsters, was precisely so popular because people were tired of simply “living to work” and wanted a better life.

We can thank Greg Niemann for writing down and publishing the inner thoughts of UPS management that so rarely make it into the public domain. The Big Idea behind UPS is the rapacious exploitation of its workforce, which has produced billions in profits during the last century. The real untold story of UPS still needs to be written.