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High gas prices aren’t just affecting drivers, they’ll soon begin impacting shipping prices.
Gas prices are also impacting UPS.
Its fuel surcharge for ground shipping went up by more than 2% this week from the previous week, to a total of 15.25%
However, the surcharge will drop to 15% next week.
UPS also sets its fuel surcharge according to the average diesel gas price.
Angel Hughes has always had her eyes on the skies.
As a young girl growing up in Newark, New Jersey, Hughes, a retired U.S. Coast Guard pilot, would always see commercial airline pilots when she traveled.
“So that was kind of the goal as a little girl,” she said.
As she traveled, though, she noticed little girls like her didn’t have much representation in the industry.
“I’d never seen a young Black female pilot in uniform, flying jumbo jets doing exactly what I wanted to do,” Hughes, now a pilot for UPS, said.
UPS, one of the world’s largest cargo carriers, still has less than 200 female pilots— that’s nearly 6% of its pilot base. And in the United States, less than 1% of all certified pilots across the aviation industry are Black women.
A family’s priceless painting ended up missing after it was shipped through UPS. After a call to Better Call Behnken, the painting has been found and shipped where it was supposed to go on Valentine’s Day.
Joan O’Dowd is grateful that the sentimental painting is now in her daughter’s condo in Chicago.
“It means a lot to her,” she said. “She was 3-years-old the day that I acquired it, my husband and I,” O’Dowd said. “She said she just sobbed when she saw it.”
Art has been a big part of Joan O’Dowd’s life. Especially two paintings of the iconic lions outside the Chicago Art Institute, near where she grew up.
“They have a lot of sentimental value to me because I met the artist when I was a little toddler and then again when I was a teenager in his home,” she said.
He says he learned everything from his father, Dominic.
Randy Pace, a daily fixture in Madison as a beloved UPS delivery driver, says he watched his father while growing up in Connecticut. Dominic, Randy says, was a natural salesman and a reader who spent time every day trying to improve his mind.
“My father used to do a lot of reading,” Pace says. “He had a knack to make people feel better about themselves. He always made people feel like a big deal.”
In fact, last Friday, during a torrential rainstorm, an organic gathering of Randy’s customers trickled in to Town Park to wish the driver well. Word spread like the death of a family member and friend that Pace has been moved by UPS to the Greensboro route. The news prompted a moment, in the rain.
The renegotiation of the UPS contract with the Teamsters doesn’t begin until August, but O’Brien said his members are already ready to strike if they don’t see a contract that meets their needs.
“We’ll put them on the street,” he said in the interview.
Still, Amazon has thus far resisted unionization — although it did have a sharp rebuke from the National Labor Relations Board for interfering in a union drive effort in Alabama — despite pressure from at least two other unions that have been trying to organize its 1.1 million American workers.