UPS plans to hire more than 100,000 workers: NPR
UPS plans to hire more than 100,000 additional workers to help handle a surge in packages during the critical holiday season. It is similar to the 2021 and 2020 holiday seasons.
Gene J. Puskar/AP
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Gene J. Puskar/AP
UPS plans to hire more than 100,000 additional workers to help handle a surge in packages during the critical holiday season. It is similar to the 2021 and 2020 holiday seasons.
Gene J. Puskar/AP
NEW YORK — UPS plans to hire more than 100,000 workers to help handle the holiday rush this season, in line with hiring over the previous two years.
Holiday volumes typically begin to rise in October and remain high into January. While online shopping has slowed from the height of the pandemic, it remains well above historical norms.
UPS said Wednesday that there will be openings for full-time and part-time seasonal positions, primarily package handlers, drivers and driver’s assistants. UPS promotes seasonal work as positions that can lead to year-round employment. In recent years, according to UPS, about 35% of people hired for seasonal package handling jobs have found permanent positions.
Seasonal drivers with UPS start at $21 an hour, with tractor-trailer drivers earning as much as $35 an hour. The package handler’s starting salary can range from $15 – $21 per hour.
The company continues to streamline the hiring process, with most hires taking just 25 minutes — from completing an online application to receiving an offer, according to Danelle McCusker Rees, UPS’s president of human relations. That is five minutes lower than last year.
Rees joined UPS as a seasonal worker.
The job market is still as competitive as it was last year, Rees said in an interview this week with The Associated Press.
Employers added 315,000 jobs in August, about what economists had expected, down from an average of 487,000 a month over the past year, according to a government report last week.
Unemployment reached 3.7%, the highest level since February. But it rose for a healthy reason: Hundreds of thousands of people went back into the labor market, and some didn’t find work right away, boosting the government’s unemployment numbers.