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Re: 'Difficult and disappointing year': UPS to lay off 12,000 employees - just six months after workers won a 'lucrative' new labor deal. What's going on with the shipping giant?

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Greedy incompetent unions

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Feb 1, 2024, 8:02:21 PMFeb 1
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On 23 Feb 2022, Steve from Colorado <SteveFro...@cocks.net> posted
some news:sv5sk7$1rd$1...@dont-email.me:

> UPS went woke and sucked union dicks. Look what happened. Fuck you
> UPS pussies.

UPS (UPS) employees are in the news once again — but this time, it’s not
gone their way.

The shipping giant, which forecast weak demand for parcel delivery in
2024, has said it plans to lay off 12,000 employees to save $1 billion
in costs. It’s also mulling a sale of its Coyote brokerage unit.

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This shocking announcement made on Tuesday comes just six months after
unionized UPS workers landed a “lucrative” new labor deal, which will
see delivery drivers earning an average of $170,000 in annual pay and
benefits by the end of the five years.

“2023 was a unique, and quite candidly, difficult and disappointing
year,” said UPS CEO Carol Tomé during the company’s earnings call. “We
experienced declines in volume, revenue and operating profits and all
three of our business segments.”

She attributed the weak performance to increased labor costs, challenges
in the broader U.S. economy, freight complications abroad and the
disruption tied to labor negotiations last summer that diverted business
to rivals.

Here’s what’s really going on with the embattled shipping giant.

A drop in business
The mass layoffs mainly target management-level and contractor
positions. They come after the shipping giant saw its revenue decline by
9.3% to $91 billion from $100.3 billion in 2022.

The company also issued a disappointing sales outlook for 2024, with
projected global revenue of between $92 billion to $94.5 billion — about
a billion dollars short of Wall Street analysts’ expectations.

UPS saw its domestic business drop by 7.4% in 2023. This was partly due
to the disruption caused by the strike action threatened by the
Teamsters union — which represents about 340,000 UPS workers — during
heated contract negotiations last summer.

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The unionized workers eventually secured higher wages for full- and
part-time UPS workers and workplace protections, like air conditioning
in UPS trucks — but not before UPS customers, concerned about delays to
their shipments, switched to rival carriers like FedEx.

During the earnings call, UPS CEO Tomé assured shareholders that the
company has so far won back nearly 60% of the business it lost during
those contract negotiations.

This directly contradicts the claim made by FedEx Chief Customer Officer
Brie Carere in December that her company was "holding on to all of the
share" it had taken from UPS.

‘A change in the way we work’
It wasn’t just the Teamsters saga that hurt the shipping company’s
finances in 2023.

UPS reported an 8.3% decrease in its international business as well,
mainly due to “softness in Europe,” as well as freight complications in
the Red Sea region and the Panama and Suez Canals.

The company’s business surged to record levels in the early years of the
pandemic as more people chose to shop online. But it has struggled to
top that benchmark when consumers returned to in-person shopping and
curbed their spending amid high inflation.

It tried to adapt by trimming employee headcount from 540,000 during the
coronavirus peak to about 495,000 by the end of 2023, through attrition
and reduced flying hours, rather than layoffs.

But, unfortunately for the UPS employees affected by the job cuts,
leadership appears to have found new cost-saving ways to conduct
business.

“It’s a change in the way we work,” said CFO Brian Newman. “As volume
returns to the system, we don’t expect these jobs to come back. It’s
changing the effective way that we operate.”

“We are going to fit our organization to our strategy and align our
resources against what's wildly important,” said Tomé. “... we've
identified new ways of working and are calling this Fit to Serve.”

UPS shares ended the day down over 8% and were flat in pre-market
trading Wednesday.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/difficult-disappointing-ups-lay-off-144500
181.html
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