UPS driver pay and benefits deal in US to be worth $170k a year, firm says
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
https://teamster.org/2023/07/weve-changed-the-game-teamsters...
https://archive.li/2023.08.09-022550/https://www.bloomberg.c...
“Everyone Wants to Work at UPS After Teamsters Deal: Indeed saw a more than 50% increase in ‘UPS’ searches”
I speculate that this is because the role of driver is a high-trust and critical operations role. This person has to reliably execute package delivery every single day regardless of the highly variable problem spaces that emerge. Without the last X mile capacity that a driver brings, all of the infra at UPS doesn’t provide value. For example a driver wakes up early every day, rain or shine (or sleet), and is accountable for making sure a truck is loaded correctly at the dock, and every package on the route is delivered. This can include packages of diamonds insured for 10’s of thousands, to hundred plus pound boxes.
I only rode shotgun for a few weeks a year and it was hard work. From that POV it a seems like a fair wage for the role.
You can call your UPS rep and get results in a month (or your FedEx rep and get results in a year IME lol) but your daily driver can make an extra pickup or make a timeframe adjustment same-day if you ask and it’s doable.
UPS drivers are personally held responsible for packages placed in their custody.
No, they aren’t “generally prohibited from making left turns” - that’s a misrepresentation. The truth is that their routing-engine is optimised for reducing idle time waiting at lights which meant that _consequently_ their navigation+routing instructions given to the driver will avoid left-turns. That’s all it is.
(When the media references this they make it sound like eliminating left-turns is the objective, rather than the end-result)
But you’re a delivery man, that’s it. In each job you need to wake up in the morning and have responsibility to do your work well. And very often you’re handling equipment/goods that exceed not only your monthly salary but your lifetime income.
That's not a reason to be highly paid (and note - nowhere I argue how much they should be paid).
Delivery, aka logistics, is one of the most important jobs in our economy.
Twitter demonstrates that companies and systems could survive for months without programmers. As the early days of the COVID lockdowns demonstrated, society would collapse within days or weeks without deliverymen.
It means he thinks people should be paid more than UPS drivers to sit in a fabric box all day developing fart apps for iPhone.
Or WFH whilst waiting for said delivery man to show up with the box from Amazon with more unnecessary Chinese garbage he didn't need.
All kidding aside, I've experienced just about every delivery company and UPS is the only one where the drivers take their jobs seriously. In comparison, I once caught FedEx performing an Ace Ventura-style penalty kick of my package onto the porch.
Yes, there're only 2 types of jobs in the world - app developer and UPS driver.
Your comment is border-line insulting to people doing other jobs, that are often much harder and dangerous, but pay much less.
If the industry cannot reliably deliver packages with proper security, safety, reliability, humanity, etc. without this level of compensation, then it’s the right number.
The interesting thing about this salary is that if you can actually earn that much without an expensive education or hard-to-attain skills, then there would likely be a lot of people saying, “heck I’ll do that for less! It sure beats massive debt and this shitty job I have.” And salaries would correct… unless there’s more to this story, or a union stops the system from correcting.
Ah yes, because the market is perfect but for those pesky unions and government interventions. The economy totally prices things efficiently on its own— managers and executives would never abuse their power to extract more than their fair share. Must be nice to live in that simplistic Econ 101 fantasy camp.
Coal mine? Farmer? Factory worker? Construction worker? Oil rig workers?
It's also grueling work, you are on pretty tight timing, and relentlessly tracked. You pretty much need to hustle all day, and have really good bladder control. Most people are not willing to actually work that hard, physically. At least they have A/C in the trucks now, here in Phoenix I couldn't imagine working that job through June, July and August (top 3 reasons not to live here).
https://www.jobs-ups.com/category/delivery-driver-jobs/1187/...
All these delivery driver jobs are $21-28/hr that I could see.
I don't know how you can make anywhere near $95,000/yr unless you're getting paid mega overtime. If they are using overtime stats to prop up their average pay, that's horse shit.
"drivers earned about $95,000 in pay annually on average or about $42 an hour"
That's 2261 hours per year, or 43.5 hours per week. More when you take into account that most people get vacation time and holidays.
Still, I don't think that's the issue you're noticing. The average is twice the starting salary. So it sounds as if they ramp up salary fairly quickly, and/or have very long careers.
Before you get to drive, you toil in a hot warehouse for several years. If you have the work ethic and stick to it, you achieve a good career.
How can wages be that high? It’s what good workers demand for good work. Everyone bitches about the problems they have when they get shipments from herky jerky companies like Laser. They pay peanuts and get what they pay for.
Becoming a driver is like joining an elite fraternity.
Let's not forget OnTrac, where I've had them show up at nearly 11 PM and chuck a package out the driver's side window into the bushes. I thought I was about to be the victim of a drive-by. In a way it was.
[1]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/01/16/can-ups-still-...
So they're still making a profit, then.
"UPS driver pay and benefits deal in US to be worth $170,000 a year, firm says"
Which, unless I've counted incorrectly, should fit in HN's headline character limits.
Looks accurate to me.
The article also says:
> Prior to the new deal, the company said drivers earned about $95,000 in pay annually on average or about $42 an hour, and another $50,000 in benefits.
So they're definitely breaking 100k now.
Propaganda, I will point out, like exactly like this headline. "170k!" you are encouraged to think. "I don't even make that much, and I deserve it. This affects me negatively somehow" you are expected to believe.
Good propaganda is as true as possible, ideally unimpeachably so.
You think the teamsters are letting people work unpaid overtime?
I also know quite a few people who drive for UPS and every one of them says it’s hard work but they’re paid well. And they have stories of “paying their dues” as a stocker or whatever before they got in the union. Also most of them seek out overtime because there’s multipliers and whatnot.
You may be confusing UPS drivers with FedEx and others who aren’t unionized and are contractors.
I think UPS is basically the best place to work as a driver.
I look at what is a benefit to me and what I would need to pay for if the employer didn’t. Health insurance is a benefit because if my employer didn’t pay it, I would.
I would not need to pay my employer social security/Medicare (nor unemployment nor workers comp, etc).
Although back when I was comparing w2 and 1099 offers I included it in my calculation because I would need to pay it for myself if I chose to work 1099.
It seems at best like it skirts the line of "technically not incorrect" for questionable reasons; compensation packages are not an uncommon topic of conversation here or in the tech industry generally and I've never once heard someone include the cost of benefits in their TC. Certainly if an employer quoted me a compensation package of $x and then revealed that 1/3rd of it was the cost of benefits I'd be quite livid.
I wouldn't, because that's exactly how most of my employers made their offer to me[1]. Not all, but most. Total compensation, in my world, anyway, isn't a rare way to put these things.
[1] The ones who do this also usually include the cash compensation somewhere in the offer letter, though. If they don't, I'll ask because that's the only part of the compensation package that I actually care about.
If my expectations are genuinely unusual then I guess I consider myself quite fortunate!
Things I ask for: -salary -average and median overtime (if applicable) -paid time off with leave and sick broken out -company holidays (eg Christmas, Juneteenth, etc) -pension -401k match -insurance - health, life, disability, dental, vision -anything else the company pays for me
I definitely care most about salary, but I compare total bottom line across offers.
If one company pays $100k and has no 401k match and another pays $95k with 10% 401k match that’s really useful in deciding.
If I’m negotiating a union contract for the union I want to know how much I’m asking and what it costs.
As an employee, I also compare total compensation packages across offers. I once had multiple offers where one was $20k higher in pay, but the insurance was way worse (cost of $3k/year vs $18k) and the leave was way worse.
So it’s a good idea to compare total pay package, not just the gross take home.