November 14, 2008: UPS profits remain incredibly high—$1.6 billion in the third quarter—but volume is down. Ground package volume is down just 2.8 percent compared to the same quarter last year. Next Day Air volume in the third quarter fell by 9.8 percent.
Management is using the drop in Next Day Air volume as an excuse for eliminating Article 22.3 full-time jobs. Many of the positions that have been eliminated involve the air operation. But the company doesn’t have a leg to stand on.
The company tried to use the “loss of volume” argument to weasel out of creating full-time Article 22.3 jobs after the 1997 strike. Our union won that issue at arbitration and UPS not only had to create the jobs, they had to pay backpay too.
At that time, film director Michael Moore sent a debt collector to UPS to collect the full-time jobs on behalf of working Teamsters. Watch the video from The Awful Truth at www.makeUPSdeliver.org