UPS Fires 250 Drivers For Protesting Colleague’s Termination

What Brown Can Do TO You: UPS Fires 250 Drivers For Protesting Colleague’s Termination

by John Prager

On February 26, 250 United Parcel service drivers organized a protest against a former colleague's firing. Workers at the UPS facility in Maspeth, NY walked off the job last month to voice their disapproval with the termination of Jairo Reyes, a 24 veteran of the company for allegedly clocking in early.

Workers say that the company's abrupt termination of Reyes. without due process is in violation of the "Innocent Until Proven Guilty" clause in workers' contracts.

After making their voices heard for 90 minutes, the employees returned to work and did their jobs.

“They delivered their message, then they delivered the packages,” a union source told the Queens Tribune.

UPS says that the firings were justified. "The employees in question abandoned their jobs and staged a protest after encouragement from the local union official, who chose to pre-empt the grievance procedure and organize a walk-out, rather than allowing a dispute to be resolved through mutually agreed upon contractual provisions,” the company said in a statement.

The union maintains that the mass firing was in violation of the contract between the union and the company, and is fighting for the jobs of all 250 workers.

A petition started by the Working Families Party has accumulated over 45,000 signatures to date.

“The tens of thousands of signatures on our petition reflect the strong disapproval of UPS’s underhanded tactics,” Bill Lipton, State Director for the Working Families Party, said in a statement.

John Prager