The Education of a Teamster Rebel: Antonio Rosario

The second is familial: the Puerto Rican pig roast. Rosario’s mom seasoned the pig the night before, and on this day, he and the workers would meet each other’s families. The celebration felt almost like a ​“coming out” party, Rosario says, with drivers and warehouse workers who’d organized at different ends of the company ​“starting to meet each other, seeing how many people were actually involved.”

When Rosario turned the pig on its spit — ​“us Puerto Ricans, we like our skin very crispy,” he says — he carved ​“Jeff” into its skin. ​“A lot of people talk about eating the rich. That day, we literally felt like we got to eat the rich.”

The roast celebrated the drivers’ effort to gain union recognition at three of Amazon’s subcontractors, known as ​“delivery service partners” (DSPs in company parlance), at Amazon’s DBK4 delivery station in Maspeth, Queens. The drivers argue that Amazon, which controls the DSPs and splashes its logo across their vans and uniforms, is their real employer and it should use its billions in profits for better working conditions. 

The message to managers, explains driver Jeffrey Arias, was: ​“We deserve better pay. We deserve better working conditions. We deserve better vans, better routes, less packages and guaranteed hours.” 

The message to Bezos: ​“Stop being a greedy pig!” 

Within weeks, Rosario successfully pushed the Teamsters to do a union organizing blitz at the remaining five DSPs at the same Queens delivery station. Organizers signed up workers around the clock outside the warehouse in view of Amazon’s security camera and supervisors. The time for timidity and underground organizing had come to an end. 

The showdown was on.

But Rosario has taken the first steps with a beachhead of unions and affiliates in New York City, covering between 7,000 and 10,000 workers. At DBK4, all eight DSPs demanded union recognition by the end of September 2024. At the JFK8 warehouse on Staten Island, Rosario was pivotal in convincing the scrappy independent union to join forces with the Teamsters in June 2024. 

Rosario brings an education in trade unionism from 27 years driving for UPS, where he participated in the rank-and-file movement Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) and the historic 1997 strike, then the largest private-sector strike in more than a decade. 

“My knees are a little creaking from getting in and out of UPS trucks,” Rosario says. ​“When I first started, the step was really high, and it was through fighting, and workers getting knee surgeries and having problems, that we were able to get UPS to get trucks with lower steps where you actually felt like you were stepping onto a vehicle off the sidewalk, which is a beautiful thing.”

Another beautiful thing workers won: power steering. ​“If you notice, back in the ​’80s and ​’90s, most UPS drivers had pretty big arms,” Rosario says, ​“and that was from turning that damn steering wheel.” 

Rosario wants other workers to have the same kind of gains that UPS Teamsters have won, but his fervor for trade unionism runs deeper than that. He often says the labor movement saved his life. 

Rosario’s father died when he was 17, and he began hanging out in the streets just as the crack epidemic ravaged working-class neighborhoods. He had run-ins with the law and had watched friends die, as he tells it, and union life showed him another way, the Teamsters’ horse-and-wheel logo as the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. He wants the Teamsters to provide the same alternative for young Amazon workers coming off the streets now.

Sometimes Rosario’s passion gets the better of him. Before hitting the road in 2019 to chase down organizing leads among Amazon workers, Rosario and other Teamsters organizers were trained not to sell the union. ​“We have two ears and one mouth”: Talk less, listen more, he says.

But that wasn’t always how things played out.

He recalls going up to an Amazon worker at a Long Island deli in 2019 and asking how the company treated him. When the worker said Amazon was treating him well, Rosario gave a quizzical look and launched into a pitch about the UPS Teamsters’ benefits and wages. The worker was unmoved; Rosario doubled down; ultimately, they ended up in ​“a screaming match.”

Not his most shining moment, he acknowledges. But his tough-love approach hearkened back to how the Teamsters educated him when he was new on the job in 1994. When he complained about paying a $50 union initiation fee, he was schooled on the spot about the power that comes with workers funding their own organization.

Three years later, in 1997, when strike talk was growing, Rosario was taking care of his mom, who had a mortgage. He floated an idea to his coworkers: “‘Would it be a problem if I kept working if you guys strike?’ And they were looking at me like I was fucking crazy. ​‘What, are you gonna be a scab? … Don’t ever do it. It’s the lowest form of life.’”

Another told him, ​“You think you’re the only one who’s worried? You’re talking about your mom. I got kids, bro.”

It was a blunt, necessary lesson, he says now: ​“This is how you fucking learn how to be a union person.”

When 185,000 UPS Teamsters went on strike that year, Rosario joined the picket lines and soon learned how powerful strikes can be. Not only did UPS lose $780 million, but managers who were suddenly tasked with delivering packages themselves (and failed miserably) were taught a lesson. 

More than anything, Rosario learned about the unique ​“camaraderie on the picket line” as people risked everything to keep big corporations from turning stable jobs into throwaway gigs. Against that dehumanizing race to the bottom, Rosario saw genuine human bonds forged, the kind ​“you don’t see happen often.” 

But the hard lessons Rosario learned then are harder to come by now. With union density at historic lows and contract terms longer than the customary three years, fewer workers than ever get to experience what it means to strike, much less what it means to be part of a militant, fighting working class.

The value of a union is so self-evident to Rosario — after all, it saved his life — that, when he talked with the Amazon worker at the deli, he had trouble grasping their perspective. ​“You can’t just come in off a union job and expect people are going to want or need all the things that you have,” he says in retrospect. ​“They have different needs.”

Not only did Rosario have to start from scratch to raise consciousness; he also had to come to grips with how Amazon’s grueling labor practices shape workers’ priorities. Many workers told him they valued the flexibility of Amazon’s ​“voluntary time off,” which lets them clock out early with a pay hit. That concept was anathema to a UPS Teamster used to guaranteed paid time off. Such on-demand employment is a live wire as high-tech companies like Amazon seek to gigify employment relations. 

Rosario was shocked, too, when he learned Amazon workers gave up breaks to meet quotas: ​“We can’t have a workforce that doesn’t take breaks!” But he learned break time often came at 1 p.m., shortly after workers clocked in; their days stretched to 11 p.m., and they didn’t want to risk staying later. 

Even if the people he’s organizing with aren’t much different from the young knucklehead who joined the Teamsters at 20, Rosario has come to understand they are living a different moment. He’s reconciled himself to the fact future union contracts will probably keep voluntary time off, and he’s considering how longer, more flexible break windows might work as a demand.

Rosario was featured in the union’s newsletter. Next to a photo of a young, muscled Rosario in a black T-shirt, his quote reads: ​“I am a perfect example of what this strike was all about. I work almost 35 hours a week as an air driver and preloader, but I get paid part-time wages.”

The strike was victorious: wage and pension increases, and the conversion of 20,000 part-time jobs into 10,000 full-time careers, Rosario’s among them.

Today, it’s Amazon that’s driving down standards, having surpassed UPS in drivers and parcel delivery volume. The 390,000 drivers at Amazon’s DSPs receive no benefits and their starting salaries range from roughly $16 to $23 an hour, while UPS drivers start at $21 with benefits, a pension and guaranteed raises up to $45. They load upward of 400 packages into their vans per shift, compared with 175 for UPS drivers. Turnover at Amazon warehouses is about 150%, part of a business strategy to prevent a ​“march to mediocrity.”

Rosario returned to the picket line in 2024, just six days before Christmas, when drivers and warehouse workers struck Amazon. It was a small test intended to mobilize eight facilities and try out picket line extensions nationwide, part of a bigger effort to force Amazon to negotiate with 10,000 workers who had demanded voluntary recognition or won an election.

Hundreds of workers participated; among the most active picket line was DBK4 in Queens. 

“It’s really poetic justice,” Levin says of Rosario, ​“that he is now one of the activists in the union who’s championing taking on the same destructive forces — this time, at Amazon, where they’re gunning for jobs in the logistics industry, which have been good, full-time jobs that you could raise a family on, and creating low-wage, throwaway, high-turnover jobs.”

That last one proved to be a challenge during the pre-holiday strike. Rosario had formed a bond with a worker over their shared Puerto Rican background and hardscrabble lives. After grueling shifts where he slung more than 400 packages in 130 stops, the worker would call up Rosario to go to the park and work out.

Several days into the strike, the worker crossed the picket line. 

When Rosario heard the news, he thought, ​“This can’t be.” He texted the worker. ​“He’s like, ​‘Nah, I just came inside to grab something. I’ll be right out.’ ” 

But the worker drove out behind the wheel of a DSP van. 

As strike marshal, Rosario was letting groups of trucks through, but when the worker’s truck came up, Rosario led the marchers forward to block it. ​“I’m looking at him through his window, and I’m asking him, ​‘Why, man?’ ” 

Eventually, the worker pulled over, and Rosario tore into him: Whatever the bosses are telling you, they’re not going to be there for you once the strike is over, he said to no avail. 

“I remember being on the side in tears, just looking off,” Rosario says. ​“And I got all these people owning the picket line, and here I am hurting about one person.” 

Another organizer, Cody Eaton, had to remind him: ​“For every one they take from us, we’ll bring 10 more,” Rosario says. ​“And he snapped me out, and I was right back.”

Like the Amazon drivers Rosario is organizing, his father worked as a third-party subcontractor, driving a Chevy van for a company called Courier Systems. ​“Don’t smoke crack,” Rosario recalls his father saying. ​“Buy a Chevy; smoke a Ford” — a tip on what car will win a drag race. 

At 50, Rosario has no aspirations to race cars, but he’s driving a Chevy Traverse as we head to a Flushing Dunkin’, where he and other Teamster organizers meet with a dozen drivers straggling in from Amazon or one of the other jobs they work to make ends meet. 

Not all of them work for Amazon anymore. According to the Teamsters, more than 50 workers at DBK4 were fired and blacklisted from any future job in the subcontracting network, in what the union alleges was a fierce retaliation campaign by Amazon. (Amazon denies the charges.) 

The fact that they are sticking around, even after many lost jobs, speaks to the bonds Rosario has formed. 

Basil Darling, a 17-year Teamster Local 804 member working on the Amazon campaign, recalls a time when a worker involved in an underground drive was fired and stopped participating. While another organizer might have moved on, Rosario kept following up to make sure the worker was alright. For Rosario, Darling says, it’s always personal: “ ​‘This is my guy. I don’t care if you got fired or not, I want to make sure you’re good.’ ” Around the same time, Darling continues, another Amazon worker’s brother was killed; Rosario made sure people in the organizing division knew there was no shame in grieving and told the worker, when the time was right, they could talk. 

It was part of the ​“each one, teach one” union culture they’ve built under Rosario’s watch — meaning that workers have responsibility to look out for those coming in. Those are the same lessons Rosario learned when he first started at UPS, as old-timers taught him how to stay hydrated on the road, buy the right winter boots, stay cool in scorching heat (a wet rag over the neck) and even prevent chafing (baby powder with vitamin E and aloe).

During the December Amazon strike, Rosario was brought back to those days and what they taught him about camaraderie in union life. ​“We were all huddled around a little propane heater, and we were fucking heating the pizza on the propane,” he says. ​“And I looked at them and I said, ​‘This is it, guys. These are moments that you guys are gonna remember forever.’” 

“He’s a very savvy organizer, but he’s also just a warm and charismatic person, and he leads from his heart,” Levin says. ​“I think he’s both managed to teach people a lot of practical organizing skills, but through the power of his own example, he’s taught people that being a Teamster is a lot more than filing grievances. It’s really about putting yourself on the line, on picket lines, and organizing drives by practicing solidarity.” 

When workers struck Amazon last December, police arrested Rosario on the picket line along with striking worker Jogernsyn Cardenas, then threatened mass arrests before breaking the line to allow vans through. After he was released, Rosario made a defiant speech, flanked by striking workers. ​“They’re violating not only our First Amendment rights, but they’re violating all the workers’ rights on this picket line,” he said. But ​“they’re not going to stop what’s happening here, because these workers are not going to back down to Amazon’s greedy billionaire status.” 

During the arrest, when police tried to force Rosario’s head down into the van, he shouted, ​“Who are we?” The line roared back: ​“Teamsters!”