UPS Reveals Plan to Hire 55,000 Seasonal Workers for Holidays
United Parcel Service announced on Monday it will hire 55,000 seasonal workers to help handle holiday shopping volume, an increase of 10 percent over the 50,000 seasonal workers it hired for 2010's holiday season. The move is based on projections for solid shopping over the next two months, and a projected spike in shipping activity in the last couple of weeks leading up to Christmas.
While UPS has not offered projections for overall volume for the season as a whole, it did say it expects delivery volume during "peak week," the seven days leading up to Christmas, to be about 6 percent higher than last year. The company expects to deliver more than 120 million packages all over the globe that week, after it delivered 113 million parcels worldwide from December 18th to 24th in 2010. For the entire 2010 holiday season, UPS delivered 440 million packages.
On October 24th, UPS's biggest competitor FedEx revealed similar plans, saying it would hire 20,000 seasonal workers for the Christmas season compared to last year's 17,000 hires, as the company is expecting a 12 percent surge in volume for the period to 260 million packages. Both companies cited a surge in online shopping in October and various retail economic projections as sources behind their shipping volume forecasts.
UPS says that seasonal hires will be utilized by its offices all over the country, mostly for loading, unloading and driver assistance. Although the 104 year-old shipping company does not offer projections for the full season, it has said that it expects volume on half of the final 10 days of the period to exceed 25 million per day, or 67 percent more than its typical daily average of 15 million. This year's peak shipping day is expected to fall on December 22nd, UPS noted, when it expects to deliver close to 26 million parcels.
Founded in 1907 as the American Messenger Company, Sandy Springs, Georgia-based United Parcel Service is the world's largest small-package delivery service, both in terms of volume and by revenue. Starting out as a local Seattle-based courier service employing teenagers to deliver messages, the company began using cars and handling packages in 1913. By 1975, UPS delivered anywhere in the contiguous US, and in the 80s the company began flying packages on its own planes. UPS airlines is now the ninth largest airline in the world.
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