Teamsters Local 89 members at United Parcel Service Inc. again are voting on a regional contract called the Central Region Supplement.

The regional contract covers geographically specific work rules, seniority and grievance procedures and acts as a supplement to a national contract between Teamsters and UPS, Mike Mangeot, manager of public relations for Louisville-based UPS Airlines, said in an email.

Voting began yesterday and continues through Oct. 9.

Union members rejected a regional contract supplement offer early this summer, as Business First reported. But UPS and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters agreed to an indefinite extension of their current national master agreement and supplements.

“While under the contract extension, it is business as usual at UPS while the vote and negotiations continue,” Mangeot wrote. “Any suggestions of potential disruptions during this period have no merit.”

Teamsters Local 89 president Fred Zuckerman also could not be reached immediately for comment.

According to the Teamster’s website, there is not support for the regional supplement.

Union members held a meeting earlier this month and unanimously accepted a motion to again vote no on the supplement, a post on the site said.

The post said the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, rather than local 89, is leading the negotiations with UPS and “the membership has seen only token attempts to resolve the many issues still lingering throughout the proposed Central Region Supplement.”

Among concerns listed on the website are that the supplement contains “dangerous language” that gives UPS “almost unlimited power to terminate employees for anything the company deems a ‘serious offense.’” The post also references modifications to the union’s TeamCare health care plan, saying it lacks many of the key benefits members and their families have come to rely upon.

“Current full-time employees under TeamCare will have an inferior plan to both part-time and new full-time employees if the package is not further modified,” it says.

Atlanta-based UPS (NYSE: UPS) is Louisville’s largest private-sector employer with more than 20,000 full-time equivalent workers. The company operates its largest air sorting hub, Worldport, and a ground operation, Centennial Hub, in Louisville.

Teamsters Local 89 represents about 8,800 workers at Worldport and about 1,900 in the company’s ground operations, Zuckerman said in a previous interview.

Another union agreement, called the Louisville Air Rider, remains in negotiations, so it is not up for consideration, according to Mangeot.

“As always, UPS continues to negotiate a contract that rewards our employees while protecting our competitive position,” he wrote.

Lewis and Hillman’s motion to organize factory workers was put to a vote and lost. They were not happy. Indeed, Lewis decked Big Bill Hutchinson, the president of the Carpenters, and stormed out—to form the CIO, a labor organization pledged to organize factory workers and that organized millions of them over the next couple of years.

No such dramatics attended yesterday’s proceedings, but the delegate who harked back to 1935 had a point. The issues before this year’s AFL-CIO convention, like the issues before the convention 78 years ago, concern opening labor’s ranks to a whole new group of workers—disproportionately minority, immigrant, and female. There was an ethno-cultural dimension to the factory-worker debate of 1935 as well: The AFL trade unions (though not the Mine and Clothing Workers) consisted disproportionately of men of Northwestern European descent, while the factory workers were often of Southern and Eastern European descent. Some were even black or, horror of horrors, women. Opening labor’s ranks to these workers was something that many in the AFL would simply not countenance.

No such hard and fast racial or gender lines were apparent in yesterday’s debate. Many of today’s unions are already heavily minority, immigrant, and female. Some of the union leaders who have been the most skeptical about allowing organizations that aren’t unions onto labor’s governing bodies have taken a leading role in the fight for immigration reform, most particularly Terry O’Sullivan of the Laborers.

Indeed, the most striking thing about this year’s AFL-CIO convention is that it’s the first one I’ve attended—I daresay, the first one, period—that hasn’t looked like a sea of middle-aged white guys. America’s unions have long had racially diverse and multi-gender memberships, but it’s taken a while for that diversity to reach the movement’s topmost ranks (AFL-CIO conventions draw their delegates from the leaders of the federation’s 50-plus unions). Today, the AFL-CIO’s two largest affiliates are headed by an African American man and a Jewish lesbian. Tefere Gebre, who will be elected the Federation’s executive vice president in balloting tomorrow, is a political refugee from Ethiopia who came to the United States as a teenager.

The resolutions enacted today, which commits the Federation to place almost as much emphasis on community coalition-building as it does on the increasingly impossible task of conventional union organizing, only furthers the impression of a movement in demographic as well as functional transition. In what I think was an unprecedented move, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka allowed three prominent allies of labor, including National Organization for Women President Terry O’Neill, to speak for the resolution, even though none were delegates or, for that matter, union members.

So, yes—by virtue of both the fundamental shift in strategy and the implications that shift has for further changing labor’s demographics, this week’s convention is a lot like 1935’s. With a signal difference, however: The changes of ’35 could only take place once the Federation split. The changes this week have clear majority support, though at some level they pose an existential threat to both a stereotype and some actual people: the labor boss of legend, old, white, male, and puffing a cigar.