via wsws.org:
UPS management is celebrating the new year with hundreds of job cuts. Day sort shifts are already being cut at the Centennial ground hub in Louisville and at the 81st street hub in Indianapolis. A day sort shift in Portland, Oregon was also briefly eliminated over the holidays before being reinstated.
This is not a one-off that will not seriously impact most of us, as the Teamsters bureaucracy would have us believe. This is the new beginning of a massive attack on jobs. The company intends to maximize profits and offset the minor wage increases under the new contract by cutting thousands of jobs.
A key role in this attack is being played by automation. This technology, which could and ought to be used to make life easier, is instead being used by major corporations to cut jobs and increase the exploitation of workers. New technologies are being rolled out that can eliminate almost all of the work inside the warehouses. The jobs of nearly 200,000 part-timers at UPS are at risk.
This is not something coming down the pike. It is here, it is happening now, and we have to organize ourselves now to fight it.
The first step is to arm ourselves with information. The Teamsters officials are helping make sure these cuts, which have been long planned, take place under a veil of total silence. They said nothing about the potential for these cuts while we were voting on their so-called “historic” contract last summer.
The UPS Workers Rank-and-File Committee, on the other hand, is fighting to puncture this veil of silence and give workers the facts they must know, and have the right to know.