March 2, 2009: UPS is destroying full-time jobs that are guaranteed by our contract.
Members are uniting to tell the company: ‘Part-Time America Won’t Work.’
It’s the worst economy in more than 75 years and good full-time jobs are an endangered species.
Our union’s largest freight employer, Yellow Roadway Corporation, eliminated thousands of jobs in February. Many other Teamsters are threatened by downsizing.
In these tough times, our International Union leaders should be working overtime to save full-time jobs. Instead, they’re writing off guaranteed full-time jobs at our union’s largest and most profitable employer: UPS. What is wrong with this picture?
UPS Full-Time Jobs Takeaway
Our Teamster contract requires UPS to maintain 20,000 “combo” jobs—full-time jobs that are created by combining two part-time jobs. Members won these jobs in the historic 1997 UPS strike.
The company is thousands of combo jobs short of the 20,000 required by the contract. And UPS is destroying more every day.
Across the country, management is breaking full-time combo positions into part-time jobs and cutting Teamsters back to part-time pay. UPS is also eliminating full-time jobs by not filling combo positions when they go vacant.
Our map in this issue gives a national picture of UPS’s Full-Time Jobs Takeaway. Click here to view the article, or click here to view it as a map.
Citing loss of volume, UPS is also laying off package car drivers and air drivers. Supervisors continue to do Teamster work including shuttling packages.
Time for Action
Members have had enough. They’ve launched a campaign to demand that the International Union enforce the contract and make UPS create all 20,000 full-time combo jobs required by the contract.
Every Teamster has a stake in this fight. If our union officials won’t take action to protect good full-time jobs when we have unambiguous contract language, then we can all kiss our job security goodbye.
Our union, our country needs good full-time jobs. We can have them at UPS if we just enforce our contract. Few problems in this economy are easy to solve. This is one of them. Let’s work together to make it happen.