Samuel Messidor
UPS has announced that it will stop day sortation operations at multiple warehouses across the country this year, a move which will result in widespread layoffs. The layoffs, planned to roll out throughout the year, include temporary workers hired on for the peak season, but also regular full time and part time workers. Layoffs have been announced so far at a dozen sites across the country.
This comes mere months after the IBT-UPS contract was rammed through by the union bureaucracy. It was praised as “historic” by the bureaucracy, but condemned by rank-and-filers as selling out the interests of the part-time workers—the majority of UPS workers.
UPS has also announced it will lay off 12,000 workers not covered by the IBT-UPS bargaining agreement in order to cut costs. The workers are non-union and probably management, though that is not stated explicitly by the company.
Over 200 workers at the New Stanton PA sortation center will lose their job in April when the entire warehouse day shift shuts down. The company cites market conditions for dropping package volume, though a worker interviewed by local monopoly media says the volume has been taken up by the newer, automated sortation centers. This story is repeated across the country, from Portland, Oregon to Mesquite, Texas, and from Louisville KY to New York City.
New Day at UPS, a worker’s newspaper run by rank-and-file UPSers, mentions the brewing layoffs and criticizes the Teamsters’ bureaucracy for their glaring silence on the issue of automation—which brings downsizing and tempo increases for those who remain, and which generally reduces the conditions of the working class as a whole while increasing the power of the capitalist class.
UPS workers in contact with The Worker say the company brags about their automation and the coming staff reductions in the older sortation centers. Workers mention the introduction of new technology, automated scanners, for instance, which eliminated their positions of a decade—with UPS giving them the option of either filling trailers with packages, a back-breaking job especially for older workers, or finding another employer.
Automation occurs as a matter of course in capitalist competition as the capitalists try to gain an edge in rate of exploitation over their competitors, introducing new time-saving machinery into production. However, this machinery is expensive to the capitalists, especially when the old machinery still has some value to give. The broad capitalist class will soon gain access to the same or comparable machinery, rendering the first capitalist’s automation edge obsolete. So the vicious cycle continues, impoverishing more and more workers in the process.
photo: UPS Hub, US Department of Agriculture
