Automakers held vehicles just off the assembly line because they didn't have all the parts. Businesses struggled to get what they needed, raising prices and wait times. In the second half of 2021, the phrase "global supply chain" began to enter casual conversations as the world emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic. More than 340,000 unionized UPS employees say they are prepared to strike if the company does not meet their demands before their contract ends July 31. In other words, brace yourself for Supply Chain Breakdown: The Sequel.Ī United Parcel Service driver pilots his truck, in New York, May 11, 2023. "The python can't swallow the alligator, and that's going to be felt by all of us." "Something's got to give," said Thomas Goldsby, logistics chairman in the Supply Chain Management Department at the University of Tennessee. Higher prices and long wait times are all but certain if there is an impasse. parcel volume, according to the global shipping and logistics firm Pitney Bowes, or as UPS puts it, the equivalent of about 6% of nation's gross domestic product. The 24 million packages UPS ships on an average day amounts to about a quarter of all U.S. In an environment of energized labor movements and lingering resentment among UPS workers, the Teamsters are expected to dig in, with the potential to cow a major logistical force in the U.S. UPS delivers millions more packages every day than it did just five years ago and its 350,000 unionized workers, represented by the Teamsters, still seethe about a contract they feel was forced on them in 2018. There are millions of families like the Rays who have swapped store visits for doorstep deliveries in recent years, meaning that contentious labor negotiations now underway at UPS could become vastly more disruptive than the last time it happened in 1997, when a scrappy upstart called became a public company. "I don't even know where to buy dog food," said Jessica Ray of the specialty food she buys for the family's aging dog. It has meant more free time on weekends with their young son, rather than standing in line for toilet paper or dragging heavy bags of dog food back to their apartment. Living in New York City, working full time and without a car, Jessica Ray and her husband have come to rely on deliveries of food and just about everything else for their home.
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