Colorado: Commerce City UPS Hub continues layoffs
Commerce City, CO – This March, United Parcel Service laid off 70 employees in the Commerce City Hub. Another 20 from one shift were laid off temporarily as a part of their recent efforts to automate buildings across the country.
This is the next step of UPS’s national “Network of the Future” campaign, which sees the displacement of workers from their jobs, the closure of up to 10% of its buildings in 2025, and, consequently, the elimination of a large section of the workforce to meet its automation goals. The recent layoffs came in a more unpredictable way to workers compared to the layoffs in January, with workers getting informed of their layoff dates with less than a week's notice and no cooperation or meetings with Teamsters beforehand. This has left many workers in the building feeling uncertain about their futures.
Thomas Chaney, a member of the Teamsters for a Democratic Union and one of the workers recently laid off, said, “All of us are feeling very blindsided by this. I might be fine for a bit, but workers have families to worry about and bills to pay. [The company] didn’t go by seniority, and they tried to protect the workers they liked over us.”
Salem Chadwick, another worker laid off from a different shift said, “Not only did I get no notice about this mess, but this comes at a time when my diabetic sister is seeing a massive cut in her hours at her own job. We now have to worry if we’re going to be able to pay bills soon. I haven't been offered work on another shift or even another building; left high and dry by management!”
In addition, the Teamsters Local 455 members were left with little information about this most recent set of layoffs. This has caused stewards to scramble across the different shifts to write grievances and try and get union members back to work as soon as possible. But with management’s plan to finish automation by November 2026, it is uncertain how many workers will be able to return to their work by that time. Some workers were given the option to follow their work to another building, 24 miles away from the Commerce City building, leaving workers displaced and stressed.