30,000 More UPS Jobs On the Chopping Block as Amazon Era Ends (cnbc.com) 42
UPS said today it plans to eliminate an additional 30,000 operational jobs this year as the shipping giant continues to wind down its partnership with Amazon -- previously its largest customer -- and push forward a broader turnaround strategy under CEO Carol Tome.
CFO Brian Dykes said on an earnings call that the cuts will be accomplished through attrition and a voluntary separation program for full-time drivers. The company also plans to further deploy automation across its network. UPS has identified 24 buildings for closure in the first half of 2026 and expects to reduce operational hours by approximately 25 million as the Amazon relationship unwinds.
Last year, UPS eliminated 48,000 jobs -- 34,000 operational and 14,000 management -- and closed 93 buildings. The company expects $3 billion in total savings from the Amazon unwind.
CFO Brian Dykes said on an earnings call that the cuts will be accomplished through attrition and a voluntary separation program for full-time drivers. The company also plans to further deploy automation across its network. UPS has identified 24 buildings for closure in the first half of 2026 and expects to reduce operational hours by approximately 25 million as the Amazon relationship unwinds.
Last year, UPS eliminated 48,000 jobs -- 34,000 operational and 14,000 management -- and closed 93 buildings. The company expects $3 billion in total savings from the Amazon unwind.
Union vs non-union jobs (Score:1)
Re:Union vs non-union jobs (Score:5, Informative)
They aren't competing with Amazon, they are working for Amazon. Amazon was using UPS for deliveries, but being Amazon they demanded terms that were simply unprofitable for UPS. So UPS is now winding down that partnership, and presumably Amazon is either looking for another sucker, or cracking the whip on its own delivery drivers a bit harder.
Re:Union vs non-union jobs (Score:5, Interesting)
Amazon is either looking for another sucker
Many of the last-mile deliveries are managed by "independent" franchises that work only for Amazon. They were trying to sell one to a sucker a few years ago in my neck of the woods. As with all franchise models, you (the franchise "owner") would invest the money, hire the drivers, purchase the Amazon vehicles, and then Amazon would dump the packages in a warehouse somewhere and you had to deliver them, and then Amazon would decide how much they wanted to pay you. Amazon claimed your annual profit would be $200,000+ per year...yeah right...and until Amazon decides to "renegotiate" the "terms."
Don't deal with the devil...
Reverse Centaurs (Score:4, Interesting)
From Cory Dotorow:
A “reverse centaur” is a machine head on a human body, “a person who is serving as a squishy meat appendage for an uncaring machine.” Here’s his example, in all its painful clarity:
Like an Amazon delivery driver, who sits in a cabin surrounded by AI cameras, that monitor the driver’s eyes and take points off if the driver looks in a proscribed direction, and monitors the driver’s mouth because singing isn’t allowed on the job, and rats the driver out to the boss if they don’t make quota.
The driver is in that van because the van can’t drive itself and can’t get a parcel from the curb to your porch. The driver is a peripheral for a van, and the van drives the driver, at superhuman speed, demanding superhuman endurance. But the driver is human, so the van doesn’t just use the driver. The van uses the driver up.
https://curmudgucation.substack.com/p/reverse-centaurs-ai-and-the-classroom
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Re:Reverse Centaurs (Score:5, Informative)
The van uses the driver up.
You don't get to be one of the richest people in the world without exploiting millions and millions of people. This is the reason all of the world's billionaires are psychopaths (with maybe one or two exceptions) - people who aren't psychopaths recognize human suffering in others and do what they can to relieve that suffering.
A matter of degree (Score:2)
The efficiency curve as a bending point after which the slope is negative. The problem is, the elites don't seem to get that.
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Doubtless the Amazon delivery franchisees also absorb most of the liability for undelivered/misdelivered packages.
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They aren't competing with Amazon, they are working for Amazon. Amazon was using UPS for deliveries, but being Amazon they demanded terms that were simply unprofitable for UPS.
In my mind they are competing with Amazon since they wanted to be a delivery service for them. I agree UPS couldn't profit based on the terms but that's competition too.
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Amazon is in direct competition with UPS with their Amazon Logistics arm. My guess is Amazon used UPS to cover holes in their logistics coverage or for extra delivery capacity during holidays or Prime Day. In my city I haven't seen an Amazon package delivered by a 3rd party for probably at least half a dozen years. A decade ago in my area Amazon packages were regularly delivered by 3rd parties USPS, UPS and LazerShip. Not so much these days.
Where I live, it's 100% Amazon delivery. Where my mom lives, it's 100% UPS and USPS. Amazon handles cities, leaving UPS and USPS to cover the more expensive rural routes. Those services wanted more money because Amazon stopped giving them the cheap-to-deliver city packages. Unless they get fully automated delivery working, at some point, Amazon is likely to run headfirst into reality and be forced to work with outside shippers again and eat the higher costs.
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I live in a pretty rural area. No way the ride from the nearest Amazon facility is less that 45 min (assuming you make no other stops). Over the past three years or so, my break down for how Prime stuff is delivered is roughly: by an amazon van (40%), some local contractor usually using private cars (30%), USPS (~20%) , FEX for more unusual / larger deliveries, UPS very occasionally.
I don't keep a careful record but that is my observation.
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UPS operated on the "business as usual" business model. Amazon operates on the "nah, we're gonna make it more efficient" business model. UPS had a heyday with Amazon, but all good things come to an end. Too bad for UPS employees, but they had it good for a long time, too, including I believe actual pensions.
I don't know (Score:2)
Re:I don't know (Score:5, Insightful)
Hanlon's Law.
Yes, you could help yourself to not attribute mistakes to malice. But it's more rewarding to find fault in others.
Re:I don't know (Score:5, Insightful)
THIS
Amazon and their drivers do a pretty good job with delivery instructions. They deposit the packaged as requested snap a photo a leave.
Anything remotely difficult like please pace the item in the box at the end of my driveway, and UPS sticks a 'we are sorry we missed you' sticker some place I won't find it for two days and demands I drive 30min each way to get my package.
won't be sorry to see Amazon take over the rest of their deliveries
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Boy, I have the exact opposite experience. I know my UPS driver's name (and two of the alternates that occasionally sub for him). If he has something that needs a signature for me he will either flag me down if I am driving or call me to get a verbal authorization. I still have his Christmas card in my car though since Amazon packages were eliminated-- I have only gotten one other UPS delivery in the past two months and he took vacation time that day.
I have consistently had similar experiences with UPS dri
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What are you on? Of course a fence building company you can sub-contract a given job.
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Meh, it's rsilvergun. I don't like the crass hate posts he was getting for a while, but he is pretty unconnected to reality.
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I don't know where you came up with this ridiculous claim, but not only is it absurd, but even if true their core business is not delivery. If you were right then Uber Eats couldn't exist.
The fact that it is being massively abused doesn't change the correctness of the original statement. One of the pillars used when determining whether someone is misclassified as a contractor is whether they are doing an essential core function of your business on an ongoing basis.
The only reason Uber or Uber Eats has managed to get away with their gross misclassification for as long as they have is because the federal law appears to never get enforced, practically speaking, except when someone sues, and th
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But the GP is absolutely correct that delivery is a core part of Amazon's business. Without some form of delivery, Amazon would literally not exist. That strongly weighs towards employee status.
Nonsense Amazon is an Internet Infrastructure company with an eCommerce arm. The eCommerce arm is like any other catalog order business before it, which as a RULE rather than an exception have always contracted out their deliveries to third parties. All that is different is scale here, in this case the delivery entities are small perhaps in some cases one individual, but that no more makes them part of Amazon's core business than the US Post is.
Now Uber/Doordash/postmates and friends are different as they a
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But the GP is absolutely correct that delivery is a core part of Amazon's business. Without some form of delivery, Amazon would literally not exist. That strongly weighs towards employee status.
Nonsense Amazon is an Internet Infrastructure company with an eCommerce arm. The eCommerce arm is like any other catalog order business before it, which as a RULE rather than an exception have always contracted out their deliveries to third parties.
First, Amazon is primarily an e-commerce company and always has been. The Internet infrastructure company merely is Amazon selling access to the technology that it had to build anyway to do its core business, which is e-commerce.
Second, again, one critical dividing line is whether the contracted company appears to be Amazon or is strongly controlled by Amazon. Sears contracted out its sales, but it did so by using an existing shipping service, paying the going rate for shipping. At most, it negotiated a
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It is still not legal to use contractors to do work that is core to your business. You can hire a contractor to build a fence but if you're a fence building company you can't hire contractors to build fences.
On the contrary; that's exactly how the entire industry of building contracting works.
Replaced by private small businesses (Score:2)
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Even in the country now (Score:1)
Amazon now has their own drivers delivering out here in the country. It just started a couple months ago.
Now we have three delivery trucks scooting around the place, Fed-Ex, UPS, and Amazon. Four if you count the post office which just dropped off a box yesterday. CO2 emissions be damned.
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CO2 emissions be damned.
You location will vary, but in some parts of the country I have experienced that Amazon and FedEX have been moving to use electric vans for at least part of their fleets (UPS and USPS are also moving towards EVs, but not yet so widely seen, at least by me). Last mile deliveries (in medium to high density locations) can be a sweet spot for electric delivery vans (the miles driven per day are modest, and they can charge (level 3) at the warehouse/depot overnight).
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No argument there. I'm surprised that none of the delivery vehicles are electric. Even if the snow and ice requires tire chains it shouldn't be a problem except maybe for the post office. If the UPS truck is a day late it's not a crisis. And the UPS and FedEx buildings have parking lots where all the trucks can be recharged at night.
78,000 in 2 years? (Score:3)
If they eliminated 48,000 jobs last year and plan another 30k this year, that totals ~78,000 people. That's the population of Flagstaff AZ. They must have been amazingly inefficient to be able to shed so many bodies and still continue to operate. That said, they had ~500k employees a few years ago and this will end up being around a 10% reduction in force.
Wish Amazon did driver safety training (Score:2)
UPS has a standard training program for drivers.
When the drivers get their route, UPS has eliminated left hand turns, avoided stop signs and other things. It makes the route safer and reduces fuel usage. They were using route mapping before GPS, before internet, before the 80286 existed.
Because of their scale, when gas got to be more than $1/gallon (90s), they were experimenting with CNG until the gas price came down again.
When I pass a UPS truck doing a delivery, it's usually off the side so it doesn't ca
UPS, start a marketplace (Score:2)
Half of success is showing up, right? So start a marketplace where others sell goods and UPS (and other carriers) shows up to provide the shipping service. You even have parcel collection and dropoff points -- you could leverage these for buyers and sellers to dropoff and pickup goods. Offer value-added services -- for example, valuation, verification and escrow of luxury goods, enabled by AI