As UPS distances itself further from Amazon, it says it will continue to cut jobs. The company’s CFO, Brian Dykes announced an additional 30,000 cuts to operational jobs in 2026, after 48,000 job cuts in 2025. UPS explained 2025’s cuts in a press release:
Transformation 2.0: We identified opportunities to reduce spans and layers of management, began a review of our business portfolio and identified opportunities to invest in certain technologies, including financial reporting and certain schedule, time and pay systems, to reduce global indirect operating costs, provide better visibility, and reduce reliance on legacy systems and coding languages. Costs associated with Transformation 2.0 consisted of compensation and benefit costs related to reductions in our workforce and fees paid to third-party consultants. The Transformation 2.0 initiative was completed in 2025.
Fit to Serve: We undertook our Fit to Serve initiative with the intent to right-size our business to create a more efficient operating model that was more responsive to market dynamics through a workforce reduction of approximately 14,000 positions, primarily within management. Costs associated with Fit to Serve consisted of benefit costs related to reductions in our workforce. The initiative was completed in 2025.
Network Reconfiguration and Efficiency Reimagined: Our Network of the Future initiative is intended to enhance the efficiency of our network through automation and operational sort consolidation in our U.S. Domestic network. In connection with our strategic execution of planned volume declines from our largest customer, we began our Network Reconfiguration initiative, which is an expansion of Network of the Future and has led and will continue to lead to consolidations of our facilities and workforce as well as an end-to-end process redesign. We launched our Efficiency Reimagined initiatives to undertake the end-to-end process redesign effort which will align our organizational processes to the network reconfiguration. We reduced our operational workforce by approximately 48,000 positions, including 15,000 fewer seasonal positions, and closed daily operations at 93 leased and owned buildings during 2025 as a component of this initiative. We continue to review expected changes in volume in our integrated air and ground network to identify additional buildings for closure. From this initiative, we computed year over year cost savings of approximately $3.5 billion in 2025. These amounts are calculated on the year over year change in volume from our largest customer, taking into account the impact of certain additional volume we have elected to serve. As of December 31, 2025 we have incurred program costs to date of $544 million, including $509 million in 2025.
The additional 30,000 was explained by Dykes on the call. He said, “In terms of variable costs, we expect to reduce operational positions by up to 30,000. This will be accomplished through attrition, and we expect to offer a second voluntary separation program for full-time drivers.”
Action Line: Click here to subscribe to my free monthly Survive & Thrive letter.
