Evette Avery is running for president of Teamsters Local 728, a well-deserved position given her strong work ethic, advocacy, experience with interstate work, and history of defending workers.
Evette Avery, a Teamsters juggernaut
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Summary
In a brisk conversation on Politics Done Right, veteran UPS steward Evette Avery recounts nineteen years of rank-and-file organizing. She lays out why she is running at the head of the “Empower Slate” to become president of Georgia-wide Teamsters Local 728, a local that now represents more than 11,000 workers across logistics, film production, waste, legal services, and beyond.
- Avery has spent seventeen of her nineteen UPS years as an elected shop steward, winning grievances and contract language to protect pensions and part-time workers.
- Local 728 spans the entire state of Georgia; its 11-plus-thousand members include UPS drivers, movie-industry drivers, sanitation workers, and attorneys, giving the next president an outsized voice in the Southern labor renaissance.
- The Empower Slate promises aggressive steward training, contract-interpretation workshops, and community-rooted programs on housing, food security, and childcare issues, Avery argues, must also be union issues.
- Her campaign builds on the 2023 UPS–Teamsters national contract, which set a new wage floor and eliminated the two-tier driver system, demonstrating that militant rank-and-file pressure can deliver gains.
- Avery frames the election as part of a national surge in labor organizing: public approval of unions stands at 71 percent, even as overall membership remains stuck at 9.9 percent.
Avery’s candidacy captures the belief that workers—especially in the anti-union South—can and must take power for themselves. Her record shows that when stewards know the contract and connect shop-floor fights to community struggles, the boss’s divide-and-conquer playbook collapses and the rank and file wins.
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The Teamsters have always been more than a freight-hauling union. From the sit-down strikes of the 1930s to the pension-defense battles of the 2000s, their locals have served as schools of democracy where ordinary workers learn to wield collective power. In Georgia, that tradition now rests on the shoulders of hard workers like Evette Avery, a steward forged in the relentless heat of UPS hubs and airline tarmacs, who is a candidate to lead Local 728 into the next chapter of Southern labor militancy.
Local 728 is unusually diverse. Its jurisdiction covers the entire state, binding together more than a dozen industries—package delivery, film production, sanitation, legal clerks, even attorneys—under one banner. That breadth creates strategic leverage: when 11,000 Georgians in essential sectors bargain together, corporate and political elites take notice. Avery grasps that leverage because she has lived every layer of it—“above the wing” as a gate agent organizing Delta ramp workers, in the cavernous UPS sort centers defending part-timers, and on picket lines in other states gathering best practices to bring home.
Her campaign’s platform is deceptively simple: educate, empower, mobilize. Education means contract-study sessions that demystify grievance timelines and seniority rights so members can enforce language without waiting for a business agent. Empowerment flows from transparent budgeting—opening the books so members see where dues money goes—and from steward academies that teach how to mount “marches on the boss” when management stonewalls. Mobilization, finally, means deploying the locals’ resources beyond the shop gate: supporting strike funds for Starbucks and Amazon workers in Georgia, lobbying for county housing bonds, and partnering with food-bank co-ops to tackle the economic precarity that even union households still face.
Critics sometimes sneer that such “social-justice unionism” dilutes bargaining power. But the data belie that cynicism. Take the 2023 UPS contract: because the Teamsters linked the fight over pay to racial justice—exposing how two-tier language disproportionately trapped Black part-timers in poverty wages—public support soared, and UPS conceded $30 billion in new money without a single package moving on strike day one. Avery, who mobilized Atlanta rank-and-filers in that contract campaign, understands that the moral high ground is also the strategic high ground.
Her run also lands at a pivotal moment. Approval of unions has climbed to its highest point since Lyndon Johnson’s presidency. Yet, actual membership numbers are just under ten percent of the workforce. The gap reveals a structural contradiction: Americans want unions, but ruthless union-busting laws—especially in the Deep South—block their path. Local 728’s statewide charter gives it a unique weapon against that blockade: it can deploy experienced, card-check-savvy organizers into warehouses, film sets, and recycling plants from Savannah to Dalton. With a president committed to cross-sector solidarity, the local could seed new bargaining units more quickly than anti-union politicians can pass new “right-to-work” laws.
Finally, Avery’s candidacy matters because representation matters. Black women sit at the heart of the low-wage Southern economy, yet they remain underrepresented in union officer ranks. Her win would shatter that ceiling inside one of the region’s most powerful private-sector locals, inspiring a generation of workers who seldom see themselves in leadership. That symbolism carries practical weight: research finds that workers are more likely to attend meetings, run for steward, and file grievances when they see leaders who share their lived experiences. ALL boats get lifted higher than when unity is not exercised.
Many often frame Southern politics as a story of voter suppression and reactionary governors. The Avery campaign reminds us that another South exists—one where multiracial coalitions of workers build durable power on the shop floor and translate it into civic engagement at the ballot box. When she prevails, Local 728 will become a laboratory for that future. The organizing infrastructure that her slate has already built—the steward schools, the contract classes, the TikTok channels demystifying “just cause”—will outlive any election cycle. Power is cumulative, and Avery is banking on the oldest lesson in labor history: when workers learn their strengths, they do not forget it.
The path from shop steward to local president is never easy, especially in a state where corporations and politicians still collude to keep wages low and workers silent. Yet Evette Avery’s journey proves that persistence yields dividends. She has already changed contract language that denied pensions, forced unjust firings to be reversed, and helped deliver the most lucrative private-sector contract in American history. Now she seeks to scale that impact across an entire state. In a moment when union density hovers at record lows and corporate profiteering soars, Georgia’s workers deserve nothing less than the bold, community-rooted leadership that Avery vows to provide. The progressive movement—and the nation—should be watching.
