BY MARK B. SOLOMON, EXECUTIVE EDITOR – NEWS
PARCEL EXPRESS
Transportation Report
THE UPS INC. OF 2023 MAY BE A VERY DIFferent company from the one that exists today.
By then, brown drones may fill the skies. Package
cars may operate with the driver in the passenger
seat. Sunday deliveries may become routine.
Local deliveries might be handled by citizen
drivers using their personal vehicles instead of by
professionals in the ubiquitous UPS vans. UPS
robots could be walking parcels from one urban
location to another. Deliveries may be made
in 30 to 45 minutes after an order is received.
Amazon.com Inc. may no longer be a big UPS
customer, but rather a full-fledged competitor.
If all that sounds far-fetched, consider that in
2013, “A.I.” was known as a Steven Spielberg
film. Robots and drones were lab experiments.
Sunday was a day of rest, not delivery routes. All
vehicles had people driving them. Lockers were
designed to hold clothes or books, not parcels.
The “last mile” was a phrase associated more
with death row than with packages. Amazon was
a force in selling stuff, not shipping it.
The parcel industry has undergone profound
changes in the past five years, and the next five
are likely to be just as transformative. It is against
this backdrop that UPS and the Teamsters union
will hammer out collective bargaining agreements for the carrier’s small-package and less-than-truckload (LTL) operations to replace the five-year
pacts that expire July 31. At stake are the livelihoods of
268,000 employees, relationships with 1. 5 million regular
customers, and the direction of the $100 billion U.S. parcel
market, and, by extension, the nation’s commerce.
As of mid-May, when this story was written, tentative
agreements had been reached on the fringe non-econom-
ic issues that typically get dispensed with early on during
negotiations. Ahead lies the bargaining over bread-and-
butter stuff like wages and benefits, as well as the opera-
tional flexibility that UPS needs from the union in order to
implement new services or expand existing ones. Neither
UPS says it needs flexibility to
compete with parcel newbies.
Will the union play ball?
Changes in parcel landscape loom
large as UPS, Teamsters knock
heads again
