UPS delivers 12,000 job cuts to white-collar management months after historic deal for unionized drivers—yet another sign the pendulum is swinging toward blue-collar workers
Obviously the article is a bit inflammatory, but the overall message really isn't wrong.
Unionize or die, basically. Obviously not literally, but one of the clearest lessons of the last year has been unions help preserve job security. It's not a lesson that should have been needed, and frankly it'll fall on far too many deaf ears, but hopefully more people realize it.
100% agree that unions are vital. That being said, I’m a current non-union employee that was promoted from union employees who I now supervise. They are in contract negotiations and I hope they get the best deal possible. I see it as mutually beneficial. Unions are absolutely necessary for workers rights. The “maybe they used to be” argument is total BS. Businesses exists to make money and if asking someone to do something unsafe makes a business more money, they will find people to do it every time. Bit of a digression on my part all to say I think I agree with you.
Yeah I was like WTF? It reads to me like "non-union workers lose their jobs while union ones don't", but then they had to somehow manufacture drama for the sake of more drama so they could add drama to their drama, when no drama needed to exist in the first place?
Yeah for sure. To me it sounds like “hey, non-union employees. You better be pushing union employees to accept less or we will just cut your jobs”. The headline alone feels very much like a threat.
Anecdotally there's seemingly been a plague of unnecessary or incompetent middle management (i.e. administrative overhead) in lots of places for lots of years.
Reducing the number of layers a bit is probably a good thing even if some people lose their jobs in the process.
You could see the writing on the wall years ago. A vast majority of driver supervisors now have little to zero area knowledge (how the routes are looped, where to go for pickups ect) they do everything through the board. My old supervisor, 10 years ago, even said they were going to be the first cuts. "You see that board?" he said," It literally will do my job later on in your career. " That's going to be your supervisor." Oh man, how right he was. Too bad they blew over 10 billion on the stupid algorithm ORION. That money should have been spent on the fleet of trucks improving gas mileage or going electric. Nope. Get a shitty ass algorithm that decides to send you directly into school traffic right when it gets out, sends you across town on a whim, and tells you it's OK to do a 5 pm pickup at 10am lmao.
I don't know about all instances but implementation of ORION was stupidly successful. I don't know what kind of back alley you work in but it did save the company a ton of money overall.
I mean, the vibe I get from this article is that white collar IT and infrastructure roles need to unionize. Laying off other working class and then celebrating it while the executives are still shit rich is aloof. Work is work, and this sucks.
Yep. Articles like this just pit the working class against each other. Delivery drivers vs IT guys is more exciting for executives than workers vs execs.
Thousands of people being laid off because companies throw away human lives every 3 months to pay 5 rich people quarterly rather than running responsible business: bad
Traditionally white collar jobs that are lumped in with management can and absolutely do unionize. The CWA is growing by leaps and bounds thanks to exactly what this article talks about. Software developers, engineers, sysadmins, and cybersecurity techs absolutely belong in a union. I agree with you that supervisors and managers cannot unionize, but a very large chunk of marketing and IT workers fall in exactly the category of people being laid off here. Work is work.
For UPS, management also includes web, backend, IT, etc positions. Basically if you weren't a hub worker or delivery driver, you're likely non-union and structured as management.