UPS Announces Thousands Of Additional Layoffs As Job Cuts Continue

United Parcel Service (UPS) announced it will slash up to 30,000 operational jobs and shutter at least 24 buildings in 2026. The decision is part of the shipping company's plan to continue pulling back from its partnership with Amazon and expand automation at its facilities.

Those job cuts will come in addition to the 48,000 layoffs the company enacted in 2025 — the same year it closed 93 buildings and increased the automation in 57 other facilities. As UPS CEO Carol Tomé reported in the company's earnings call for Q4 2025, all these changes saved the company $3.5 billion in 2025 (via Investing.com). It was in this same call that Tomé announced the incoming layoffs, and she estimated they will save the company another $3 billion. 

As for how those 30,000 jobs would be eliminated in 2026, Tomé stated, "This will be accomplished through attrition, and we expect to offer a second voluntary separation program for full-time drivers." She went on to say those 24 buildings slated for closure will likely have their doors shut by June 2026, and more could meet the same fate after that.

The driving force behind these cutbacks is Tomé's desire for "a more profitable, agile and differentiated UPS," as the CEO put it in a January 2025 earnings call (via a transcript from The Motley Fool). That meant lessening UPS' dependence on Amazon. Despite recently paying out a $2.5 billion settlement to its Amazon Prime members, Amazon is UPS' biggest customer. However, Tomé revealed that, despite this fact, the digital marketplace is not UPS' "most profitable customer," which spurred UPS to pull back its deliveries from the retail giant by at least 50% by the second half of 2026.

While Amazon contributed 11% of UPS's $91.1 billion of revenue in 2024, that was significantly less than the 13.3% of revenue UPS got from Amazon back in 2020, Supply Chain Digital reported. To make up for that loss, Tomé accelerated plans to make UPS more efficient by increasing automation in the company, which led to layoffs. A year later, Tomé told investors in January 2026 that automating UPS facilities saved tons of money in slashed work hours. Additionally, the company's investment in artificial intelligence and new tech tools for exporters has helped UPS "process nearly 90% of all cross-border transactions digitally," Tomé said.

UPS is hardly the only company that is cutting jobs with automation. For example, massive food and beverage company Nestlé announced it would cut 16,000 jobs by the end of 2027. And on January 28, 2026, news broke that Amazon would shed another 16,000 of its own corporate employees in 2026 in addition to the 14,000 workers it laid off in 2025. The trend could get worse, too. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told Axios that AI could cause the unemployment rate to jump by as much as 20% by 2030.

But tech can create new jobs, too. At least that was what IBM discovered when it replaced employees with AI in 2023. Specifically, the company replaced 8,000 human resources workers with its AskHR program. But by 2025, IBM ended up hiring more employees to fill jobs requiring "critical thinking" that AI still couldn't do as well as humans, CEO Arvind Krishna told the Wall Street Journal.

So, it's possible that after cutting those additional 30,000 jobs, UPS will find out it still needs humans and hire thousands of new employees. Until then, workers at UPS and elsewhere may want to accept that companies don't value your loyalty anymore, and a robot or program may be liable to take their job in this round of layoffs or the next.