United Parcel Service (UPS) eliminated roughly 48,000 jobs in 2025 as part of its sweeping “Network Reconfiguration and Efficiency Reimagined” program, the largest workforce reduction in the company’s history.

The job slashing, involving tens of thousands of operational workers and nearly 100 facility closures, is projected to include another 20,000 positions in 2026 under the same restructuring drive. These job cuts are bound up with a strategic downsizing of UPS’s reliance on Amazon volume and a massive expansion of automation and robotics.

Meanwhile, the layoffs have been carried out with the collaboration of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters bureaucracy led by President Sean O’Brien. Union officials worked systematically to contain and dissipate opposition among workers after ramming through the 2023 contract that paved the way for this assault.

Public filings and earnings reports show that UPS reduced its workforce by about 48,000 positions over the course of 2025, equivalent to roughly 10 percent of its 490,000‑person workforce. Most of the cuts were taken from the “operational workforce,” including package drivers and inside sort workers.

Of these, approximately 34,000 were operational jobs and about 14,000 were management positions, many achieved through “voluntary” buyouts that were coerced under the threat of mass layoffs, with 90 percent of participating full‑time drivers forced out by August 31, 2025.

The destruction of jobs is inseparable from a drastic consolidation of UPS’s physical network. In the first nine months of 2025, UPS shut down daily operations at 93 leased and owned facilities and signaled that more buildings are “under review” for closure.

UPS management projects that this restructuring will wring at least $3.5 billion in annual cost savings from the workforce between 2025 and 2027. These “savings” represent the unpaid wages, destroyed livelihoods, and intensified exploitation of the remaining workforce and are contributing to improved UPS profitability.

Although financials for 2025 are yet to be published, UPS is expected to have reduced annual revenue of $88 billion, compared to $91 billion in 2024. Net profits in 2024 were $5.8 billion (6.37 percent); job slashing and restructuring in 2025 are expected to result in a net profit of $5.5 billion (6.25 percent).

As of September 30, 2025, UPS executives boasted that they had already stripped out $2.2 billion in costs compared to the previous year, while warning that the “network reconfiguration” will continue through 2027 in ever‑deeper rounds of consolidation, job elimination and speed‑up.

These cuts have resulted in a windfall for UPS investors. Shareholder payouts totaled approximately $6.52 per share in 2024 and are projected to reach about $6.56 annually for 2025. The 2025 payments also included $1 billion in share buybacks by UPS.

UPS CEO Carol Tomé has presented the job massacre as a “significant strategic shift,” repeatedly declaring that the company is reengineering its network to “emerge as an even stronger, more nimble UPS” in the face of a changing trade environment and an “uncertain macro environment.”

In comments linked to the restructuring, Tomé called the program “the most significant strategic shift in our company’s history,” making clear that workers are being sacrificed to preserve profitability and shareholder returns. A central pillar of the plan is a deliberate reduction of UPS’s dependence on Amazon, historically its largest single customer but now a direct competitor that has built out its own delivery network.

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