A United Parcel Service employee said she felt betrayed this week after receiving news the company plans to shed about 200 jobs from its New Stanton delivery hub.
“In the end, we got screwed. It’s rough. Something’s not right to me,” said Lindsey Kramer, 37, of Mt. Pleasant.
She was outside the New Stanton Fire Hall on Wednesday, where officials of Teamsters Local 30 talked about what might be in store for the union workers at UPS. About 150 employees attended the meeting.
“Our whole lives are changed by this,” said Kramer’s husband, Devin Mills.
The couple holds two of the part-time jobs — 3½ hours or more a day — that UPS told the state Department of Labor and Industry in a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification it will be eliminating on April 15.
The company said affected employees include 167 part-time hourly workers, one full-time hourly worker, 31 part-time managers and seven full-time managers.
UPS said in a statement Tuesday that the elimination of jobs at the New Stanton delivery center, as well as other facilities, is part of a strategy to reduce its package-sorting operations at New Stanton and other UPS facilities to “meet volume demands.”
Eugene “Gino” Bosetti, president of Teamsters Local 30, declined to comment after the meeting with membership for more than two hours.
Kramer and Mills, like several other employees, said they have been off work since January. They had been working 3½ hours a day, and more during the run-up to the busy holiday shipping season, but that changed in January when they were not needed as the volume of packages being shipped dropped.
Some workers said they were working one day a week or using vacation time for one day of work so they could remain eligible for the company’s health insurance.
Several UPS workers leaving the meeting said they did not know whether they would have a job after April 15. Some workers with less seniority said their future employment opportunity at UPS might hinge on workers with more seniority opting for retirement or landing another job. Day shift workers were told their only option was to take a job on the “twilight shift” from 5 to 9 p.m. or the night shift from 10:30 p.m. to 2:30 a.m.
Workers with less seniority at UPS are more likely to lose their jobs, prompting one younger part-time employee to say he will start looking for another job. Representatives from PA Career Link, the state’s agency that assists in job searches, were at the meeting.
Others expressed their distrust of UPS.
“They’re not telling us stuff, and, when they do, they change a lot,” said Kim Busch of Jeannette, who works part-time during the day at the New Stanton hub.
Busch said she learned UPS would be closing the day packaging operations a few weeks ago, but the official notice did not come down until last week.
“It’s devastating,” Busch said.
She said she was hoping to reach 25 years with UPS so she could retire with a full pension.
“I need a little over a year,” she said, noting the volume of work has been really low.
“I’ve never seen it this bad,” Busch said.
Karey Moore of Youngwood, who has 29 years of seniority, said she will be eligible for a job on the twilight shift but would have to go from sorting packages to loading trucks, a grueling job she did decades ago.
“I would lose seniority. We are being treated unfairly by the union,” which should get changes in the contract to allow the senior workers to take on their same job in the evening, Moore said.
Moore has to make a decision by April 15.
“I think they are trying to push the older people out,” she said.
Joe Napsha is a TribLive reporter covering Irwin, North Huntingdon and the Norwin School District. He also writes about business issues. He grew up on Neville Island and has worked at the Trib since the early 1980s. He can be reached at jnapsha@triblive.com.