UPS plans to lay off an undisclosed number of employees as it shutters a package sortation shift at its Centennial ground hub in Louisville, Kentucky, on Feb. 16.
"In our industry, packages equal jobs, and we need to match capacity and the number of jobs with current package volume," the company said in an emailed statement.
The company grappled with declines in package volume over the past several quarters and is attempting to win back volume that it lost during contract negotiations with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters in the summer.
The closure of the facility's day sort affects any employee assigned to those operations, although some impacted workers will have the opportunity to move to other positions, a UPS spokesperson said Tuesday.
UPS disclosed the layoff plans less than a month after the Teamsters said the company laid off about 35 specialist and administrative workers at the hub. UPS quickly reinstated the affected employees after the union threatened to strike over the layoffs, which impacted workers that recently organized with the Teamsters.
Teamsters Local 89, which represents more than 2,000 UPS workers at the hub, said in a statement Friday that it has meetings scheduled with the company to gather more details about the impending closure of the hub's day sort. Since that shift "is a relatively small operation," most of its volume can likely be absorbed into other existing sorts, the union said.
"With [the hub's] natural turnover rate, as well as the likelihood of the work being moved to the larger sorts, Local 89 does not anticipate a massive impact on our membership beyond shift and schedule changes," the union said.
