UPS’s buyout plan violates Teamsters’ national contract.
Washington, D.C. Later this month, United Parcel Service (UPS) is anticipated to reveal a criminal plot to buy out full-time Teamsters employees. This corporate scam would directly violate the union’s national contract, which protects 340,000 delivery workers.
UPS has not yet made public the multibillion-dollar company’s Driver Voluntary Severance Plan (DVSP), which would provide drivers with financial incentives to begin early retirement or leave their position. In addition to undermining UPS’s own legal pledge to generate 22,500 additional jobs under its existing Teamsters contract, the DVSP, which is expected to be introduced to employees in the coming weeks, would leave the majority of drivers without adequate health insurance if they retire under the program.
By offering offensive buyouts to Teamsters workers, UPS is attempting to skirt the issue of establishing decent union employment in America. “It is an unlawful breach of our national contract,” stated Sean M. O’Brien, General President of Teamsters. Under the deal, UPS is required to create tens of thousands of additional full-time positions. However, UPS’s corporate administrators and CEO Carol Tomé are betting that if they provide enough employees with meager severance benefits, no one will notice that the business is burning the union’s contract. UPS employees put in far too much labor to deserve such rude treatment.
Compared to what rank-and-file Teamsters already make and may make for the duration of the present agreement, the proposed cash offerings would be significantly less. A robust union benefit that would not be available to all employees under UPS’s severance plan, Teamsters contracts have traditionally guaranteed that UPS drivers who have worked for the company for 30 years or more will get employer-paid health insurance into their retirement.
In August 2023, UPS Teamsters adopted a landmark five-year deal that ensured the business will generate at least 7,500 new full-time positions over the last three years of the contract and fill at least 22,500 permanent full-time jobs with current part-time employees.
