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UPS Inc. employees at several Teamsters union locals have soundly rejected their respective riders and supplements to a five-year collective bargaining agreement which was ratified in October despite the majority of voters rejecting the contract.

The actions by the locals means that the contract, which was to be implemented retroactive to July 31, 2018, will not go into effect for an undetermined period. Under rules governing the UPS-Teamsters contractual relationship, the master contract cannot be implemented until all locals ratify their respective supplements and riders.

The rejections also set the stage for Teamster leadership to impose the contract on all locals if the side agreements are not ratified at the various locals. The international union took such a step in 2014 after several locals voted to reject their supplements, delaying the implementation process for months beyond the ratification date the year before.

Electric is the future of commercial trucking, said Carlton Rose, but the industry is not there yet. Rose, president of global fleet maintenance and engineering for UPS, told attendees at the Green Truck Summit in Indianapolis, Indiana, on Tuesday morning that UPS is committed to exploring all possible propulsion systems, but that ultimately, he believes electric will become the dominant option, with a caveat.

“I have one big problem with predictions,” he said during his keynote address, “they are wrong more than they are right. … [because] predictions rest on the assumption that the future is like the past.”

Rose oversees more than 340,000 global assets in his division, managing over 8,000 managers and supervisors and 454,000 employees.

“Fleets want solutions that work,” he noted later in his speech. “If the technologies don’t work, it doesn’t matter what they cost or how much in subsidiaries are available.”