BrownCafe

The United Parcel Service provided 20 Maspeth employees with pink slips this week with potentially more to come, the company said.

“We have implemented the release of a group of employees that participated in the Feb. 26 walkout,” a spokesman for UPS said in a statement. “Our first priority is to maintain orderly delivery operations and we chose to release 20 employees in order to minimize the chance of any impact on customer commitments. The misconduct on Feb. 26 was serious and the company is taking contractually appropriate actions to address those employees involved in the unauthorized work stoppage.”

A source who is familiar with the mass terminations said there were several more to come this week for the same reasons as stated by the company.

If the trajectory of American daily life keeps heading in its current direction, the country may end up with only two dominant occupations:

— Carrying stuff in boxes to people’s houses.

— And keeping a watchful eye on those same people so they don’t hurt each other or steal things when they do leave their homes.

It only takes a quick internet search of the terms “UPS” and “telematics” to understand why the promised benefits of big data are likely to take longer to arrive than many have been led to believe.

Five years after it started installing sensors to monitor its vehicles and using GPS to track their movements, UPS launched one of its most ambitious technology projects: a system capable of handling the massively complex task of optimising the routes taken by its tens of thousands of drivers. No matter how impressive the technology, it is only as good as the people who use it.

“For the first time in their 100-year history, they can make real-time routing decisions about picking something up and dropping it off,” says Tom Davenport, a US management expert and author, most recently, of Big Data at Work. He adds: “It takes a lot of autonomy out of the job [for drivers]. UPS people say that change management is the biggest issue.”