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Imagine taking the time out of your busy day just to show appreciation for someone else. That’s what nearly two dozen people in Snoqualmie did on Thursday.
Snoqualmie residents came with signs and stories about a man they know as Nabou.
“I love to golf and he’ll ask me how my tournaments go,” said 12-year-old Carter Pass said.
“You see him coming and you’re like ‘Oh, he’s here,” Arlene Cormier said.
Part of the Biden administration’s new strategy on allocating COVID-19 vaccines targets rural communities, which have some of the lowest vaccination rates in the country. In line with that goal as well as the imperative to speed vaccines to remote areas worldwide, major carriers have adopted innovative approaches to ensure that people don’t have to travel far to get the vaccine from a trusted source.
Since late last year, UPS and FedEx have made major adjustments to get COVID-19 vaccines in the hands of remote medical workers both domestically and globally.
Timing is everything
Ironically, a couple months before the pandemic exploded, UPS started a separate division, UPS Healthcare. It launched in January 2020. The goal was to focus on complex medical products like vaccines, as well as many others. Then the pandemic hit the U.S. hard that spring.
“We had this major disruption. So most of our attention was taking our resources and focusing on testing,” Dan Gagnon, vice president of global healthcare strategy and marketing at UPS, told FreightWaves. “We were helping the federal government set up national test sites, and we were helping states set up their COVID testing sites. We put up the tents, we’d get the kits to them, we’d collect the samples and bring them back to the labs.”
UPS (NYSE: UPS) today announced its regular quarterly dividend of $1.02 per share on all outstanding Class A and Class B shares.
The dividend is payable June 9, 2021 to shareowners of record on May 24, 2021.
Commitment to the dividend is one of UPS’s core principles and a hallmark of the company’s financial strength. UPS has either maintained or increased its dividend each year since going public in 1999.
United Parcel Service drivers represented by the Teamsters union picketed Wednesday at a distribution hub to call attention to long hours and extra days being worked in the pandemic.
The 80 to 100 drivers based in Auburn are frustrated about being overworked during the pandemic, said Brett Miller, president of Local 340. The goal is to get the attention of management, he said.
“They are working Christmas hours and they’ve been doing this for 14 months straight. They’re wearing down,” he said.
The 1.2 million member International Brotherhood of Teamsters is one of the largest and most powerful unions in the U.S., with a vast marble headquarters and billions in pension fund assets. But there have been internal conflicts with the union, including over a controversial 2018 contract with UPS that was implemented despite the membership’s majority “no” vote. Now, in the lead-up to the November election to determine the next Teamsters president, that UPS contract is once again taking center stage.
While the two candidates vying for the presidency have pledged to remove a rule that allows union leadership to implement contracts in certain circumstances against the will of the membership, only one of the candidates, Boston Teamster leader Sean O’Brien, has the track record of opposing the 2018 UPS contract that is the case study for those seeking the rule change. The other candidate, Colorado Teamster leader Steve Vairma, is seen as more closely aligned with outgoing President James Hoffa and was notably silent as a majority of voting UPS members opposed the 2018 contract.
That UPS contract, which 54 percent of UPS Teamsters voted against, will loom large over the election. To successfully win union representation elections, unions need to show that they are able to provide more than the status quo. If the union’s largest contract in the country — in this case, UPS — has starting wages 13 percent below what its non-union rival Amazon offers, the union’s ability to convince Amazon workers that they need to unionize to improve their position diminishes. (Overall, though, UPS offers workers a much better deal.) And given that UPS Teamsters perform very similar work to many Amazon workers — sorting, tracking, and delivering packages — the union needs rank-and-file UPS Teamsters to get involved in the organizing campaign to have any possibility of success. If Teamster members at UPS are too angry at the union for implementing an agreement a majority didn’t want, they’re less likely to become involved in a new organizing campaign at Amazon.