Samuel Messidor
UPS has announced it is closing a Portland, Oregon warehouse entirely by July 1 after laying off its day shift at the facility last year.
In addition to the Oregon facility, UPS is closing facilities in Denver, Colorado, Vernon, California and Oklahoma City this month. The closed facilities will all be fitted with the new automated technology and then re-opened in 2026, but the Teamsters vice president John Palmer predicts that only a fraction of the laid-off workers will be rehired then.
The Teamsters local in Portland is encouraging workers to apply at other UPS locations, though workers speaking to monopoly media report that moving shifts and moving locations are both difficult and draining.
UPS has already laid off 12,000 workers over the last year across the country.
The closures and layoffs are part of UPS’s “Network of the Future” plan, which the company says aims to cut $3 billion in operating costs by 2028. By then, UPS plans to have automated 400 of its facilities, triple the current number.
Automated facilities, called “Smart Hubs” by UPS, replace various aspects of warehouse work with machinery, leading to layoffs and tempo increases for those workers who remain. However, even at the non-“Smart” warehouses, UPS has used systems like automated package scanners to replace workers and increase work tempo for the part-time workforce at an already back-breaking and low-paying job, according to current and former UPS warehousemen in touch with The Worker.
The UPS contract—hailed as “historic” and pushed down the rank-and-file’s throat by the Teamsters bureaucracy—did not include any protections against automation, tempo increases, or layoffs. The implementation of air-conditioned trucks, one of the few hot-button issues in the contract, has been derailed by the company. The contract language left the timeline for the purchase of air-conditioned delivery vehicles entirely up to the company, and did not even mention heat safety for the part-time warehouse workforce. Warehousemen, who work unstable, part-time hours, make up the majority of Teamsters-organized workers at UPS.
Industry sources and monopoly media claim that the widespread layoffs were planned only after the Teamsters called off the strike. However, a former UPS warehouseman told The Worker that the company was openly bragging in training sessions about its plans to automate and increase work tempo at least one year before the new contract.
Despite the total lack of action from the union bureaucracy on the issue of automation, Teamsters VP Palmer told The Oregonian that the union leadership saw the layoffs coming and “should have had a strategy” during the 2023 contract negotiations with UPS. He cited a hypothetical deal that would offer laid-off workers jobs maintaining the technology the capitalists use to push them into the army of the unemployed, increase the workers’ workload and tempo, and depress their wages.
Palmer’s belated criticism of the sell-out contract he supported in 2023 comes after he criticized Teamsters President Sean O’Brien for speaking at the Republican National Convention last year, showing a rift in the chauvinist union bureaucracy between the “reformist” O’Brien and his vice president.
Photo: Automation at a UPS warehouse. Retrieved from UPS website.
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