news

Just stripping the copper out of the walls

For the last three months of 2023, UPS reported net income of $1.61 billion, or $1.87 per share, compared with $3.45 billion, or $3.96 per share, a year earlier. Adjusting for one-time items related to pensions and intangible assets, UPS earned $2.47 per share.

Revenue declined 7.8% to $24.9 billion from $27 billion last year.

The company reported a 7.4% drop in average daily volume domestically and an 8.3% decrease internationally. UPS said the international decrease was primarily due to “softness in Europe.”

Though the earnings report did not directly mention any financial impacts from negotiations with Teamsters in August over labor contracts, Tomé cited the negotiations and the macroeconomic environment more broadly as contributing to the “disappointing” year.

Looking ahead, UPS’s 2024 outlook expects revenue to range from $92 billion to $94.5 billion, with an adjusted operating margin of about 10% to 10.6%.

It's partially due to fucking around on the contract but UPS didn't engineer the recession that we're currently screaming towards at Mach 5. Also, a fair number of those layoffs are going to be useless PMC positions. Doesn't stop Carol and the whole board from being ghouls and making it far worse than it needs to be by greenlighting billions in stock buybacks, though.

The Teamsters contract was not very good in the first place end they didn't fight very hard to establish good leverage. The TA was surprise-announced from behind closed doors and their reform caucus wasn't ready to organize the "vote no" campaign they wanted to, and should have.

Socialist organizations rallied behind the Teamsters because they do not have particularly sophisticated approaches to labor. They just wanted to be vaguely pro-labor and half of them are doing a Trot rank-and-file thing without even knowing it's a Trot strategy.

A good rule of thumb is whether you had to go on strike to get a contract. No huge company is going to be nice to you and let you avoid a strike to get what you deserve. That's a psychology that only applies to a rare petty bourgeois tyrant. Large companies are anti-union machines trying to find the cheapest way to prevent union action, which has traditionally been to intimidate and to buy off union staff/play on the psychology of union staff who aren't prepared to organize a fight.

If you're in an org, I recommend introducing critical support to your labor work, just like you do with AES. Both uncritical support and pointless criticism of unions are bad strategy, but I'm amazed that I have seen zero orgs offering "friendly advice" that celebrates the power of having a union while offering a vision for how it can be better and how we should organize for the next contract. UPS workers knew they wanted more from this and there were zero socialists, so far as I could tell, saying, "yeah you're right, and you can make that a reality by joining this group and doing this work". It feels like every socialist org is playing catch-up and therefore missing the real opportunities, opportunities that require months to years of preparation.