UPS At Risk: 37,500 Temps

December 22nd, 2010 by

This is a very busy time for delivery companies.Whether it’s the post office, UPS or FedEx, there are more packages moving around than people to handle them. The UPS solution is the hiring of 37,500 (!) temporary workers. These folks have been working for a few weeks and will continue working right up until Christmas Eve, when they will all be laid off. Due to the struggling economy, UPS had no trouble filling temporary jobs. This year, many laid off white-collar workers donned the drab brown uniforms and hopped on board delivery trucks, occupying the “jumper” seat next to the regular driver.
The Wall Street Journal has a nice article about this war-scaled ramp up (subscription required). As you can imagine, there is not a whole lot of time for training the new employees: a few tips on lifting “in the power zone,” a caution about getting into the truck (“three point contact”) and then off you go. The job is a frenzy of lifting, bending, carrying and climbing. These are physically demanding jobs, with relentless exertion required.
Risk Management Nightmare
Which leads to a loaded question for the risk managers at UPS: what percentage of this temporary workforce will be injured on the job? Even if it’s only one half of one percent, that would be nearly 200 people. In all likelihood, they will have been laid off before the claim has been filed. And once laid off, these temps will have no loyalty and no commitment to UPS. They will have already handed in their brown uniforms.
More troubling from a risk perspective, the types of injuries may be the most open-ended and expensive claims in the comp system: back, shoulder and knee injuries, slips and falls on ice (for most of the country it is, after all, a rather tough winter). Statistically, you can expect an occasional robbery or animal bite.
All business entails some risk. Hiring strangers is always risky, no matter how thorough the vetting process – and in this case, that process is foreshortened, to say the least. Placing thousands of temporary employees into physically demanding jobs increases risk exponentially.
So when you go home tonight and look for the packages you are expecting, think for a moment on the harried temporary employees who brought them to your door. And say a little prayer, that the New Year brings these former white-collar workers health, happiness…and a job once again suited to their hard-earned skills.

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