Pink slips at Big Brown
It was a surprise, but not a pleasant one, to see that United Parcel Service (or UPS, as I guess it prefers to be known these days) is shutting down a sorting operation on Swan Island and laying off more than 300 people. They say there just isn't enough volume of shipping in these parts to keep the operation going.
Boy, you talk about a canary in a coal mine. Portland is sliding down a chute that seems to have no bottom. Who's going to turn things around? Carmen Rubio?
The canary died when downtown collapsed. The UPS shutdown indicates another segment of Portland commerce is disappearing
ReplyDeleteIf I remember correctly, the brother of the founder of UPS, Harry Casey, was a Portland auto dealer who became rich through his own investment in UPS, and was very generous to the law school.
ReplyDeleteWe don’t need any traditional industries here in Portland. No sir. We just need a steady supply of “young creatives” with a penchant for biking and for leading carbon neutral lifestyles.
ReplyDeleteI’m sure Amazon taking over its own shipping operations have impacted UPS and played a role in this workforce reduction.
ReplyDeleteI think this is the issue — overall, the delivery business is up in Portland as in everywhere else — but this businesses that choose the shipping service choose non-union services rather than using union vendors like UPS or USPS.
DeleteUPS is the outbound shipping backbone for small business packages. If the shipment of small business packages from Portland is shrinking, it means that a sector of Portland commerce shrinking. This community can not survive by supporting a service industry. It needs small businesses that make things.
ReplyDeleteNot only has the canary died, the candle is flickering.
ReplyDeleteI used to have a gig there loading trucks, starting at 2:30 AM and going till 7 or so. Sometimes I'd play a gig before I went to work. Oh the energy of youth. Sad to hear, but likely a lot more of that going to happen soon as our unpayable debt goes terminal this year or next.
ReplyDeleteWhat unpayable debt? State revenue is running so far ahead of projections that we're going to have another absurd kicker, rather than putting the money into a rainy day fund to cushion the next downturn or pay down accrued pension obligations. And nationally the economic picture is literally the best in the world in terms of recovery from COVID. Employment is up, wages are up, including at the very bottom, inflation is coming down down down.
DeleteJust because a capitalist economy is constantly reconfiguring the deployment of capital (favoring some businesses and disfavoring others) doesn't mean the sky is falling.
Communists have never understood the free market system.
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