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UPS has started hiring thousands of workers for a massive Southeast ground hub to open on the westside of Atlanta, one of the largest developments in the area in years.
The Sandy Springs-based shipping giant plans to hire 2,500 to 3,000 people to work at its Southeast Metro Automated Routing Terminal hub in Atlanta by November.
However, the majority of the positions at the facility will be part-time: Of the total, about 700 will be full-time jobs, including drivers, mechanics and managers.
UPS today announced a tentative agreement for a new Master UPS Freight Agreement with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. The five-year agreement, which is subject to ratification, covers about 11,000 Teamsters-represented UPS Freight employees.
UPS’s goal for the freight and small package agreements has been to reward the company’s employees for their contributions to its success while enabling the business to remain flexible to meet its customers’ needs. Meeting these goals for both the freight and small package agreements, UPS is poised for continued growth supported by greater flexibility to meet the needs of its customers.
With agreements now reached for both the freight and small package national master contracts, discussions continue for small package supplements and local agreements. Strong progress has been made on many local small package agreements and supplements, including a handshake agreement covering more than 100,000 Teamster-represented UPS employees located in the Central Conference, the Southern Conference, and Oregon / Idaho, among others. Other local agreements and supplements continue to be negotiated.
The new agreements will go into effect August 1, 2018, once they are ratified by employees.
The sleeper drivers for UPS can look forward at the start of August 2022 to make as much as 96 cts per mile.
That was one of the details revealed Monday in a conference call by the Teamsters union, discussing the preliminary five-year contract the company and the union reached last month to replace the contract that expires at the end of July.
Denis Taylor, the director of the Teamsters Package division and co-chairman of the Teamsters Negotiating Committee, conducted the call in cooperation with the union’s communications division. While the call was held Monday, its details were embargoed until Tuesday at 10:45 a.m. Eastern time.
United Parcel Service Inc. and the Teamsters agreed to extend their current labor contract past its July 31 expiration to wrap up 38 supplemental accords with locals, the union said.
The extension doesn’t have an end date, but negotiators expect to conclude all talks within two months, said Denis Taylor, co-chairman of the Teamsters National UPS Negotiating Committee. Company and union officials reached a tentative master agreement about three weeks ago.
Sealing the labor contract and averting a strike is crucial for UPS’s efforts to compete with FedEx Corp., which uses ground-delivery drivers who aren’t unionized. UPS workers last went on strike in 1997. The Atlanta-based courier is the third-largest private employer in the U.S., behind Walmart Inc. and Amazon.com Inc.
A 32-year-old UPS driver claimed he was assaulted by a Bainbridge Island couple while parked in the loading zone outside the Safeway grocery store unloading boxes.
The driver said a man, 67, of Bainbridge, came up to him and asked him to move the truck so he could get out of a nearby parking spot. The truck driver said he would move as soon as he was done unloading the boxes.
The man asked him to move right away and the driver said no, as he was legally parked in the loading zone.
The man asked him to back up a bit so he could leave and the driver said he was not allowed, by company rules, to back the truck up.