FedEx workers: speak out against the mass layoffs by filling out the form below. All submissions will be kept anonymous.
FedEx is laying off all 856 employees at its FedEx Supply Chain Logistics & Electronics center in Coppell, Texas, 20 minutes northwest of Dallas. The layoffs are beginning in “phases” starting in January, with the facility fully closing in April. This comes amid an ongoing job slaughter, with 32,000 jobs being cut in November and 30 percent of US corporations planning holiday season layoffs.
The explanation given by the company is that “this action is necessitated solely by our customer’s decision [an undisclosed business] to transition its business to a new location that will be managed by a new third-party logistics provider.” A similar explanation was given in the announcement of the layoff of 611 workers at a Memphis Fed Ex Supply Chain center.
The layoffs were detailed in a WARN (Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notice) notice to the Texas Workforce Commission. The WARN Act requires that private employers give notice 60 days in advance to relevant state authorities and employees for layoffs affecting more than 50 people. Recent notices in Texas notices are viewable on the TWC website here.
The WARN Act does not cover contractors, however. Given the large number of independent contractors that FedEx relies upon for shipping and other aspects of operating the site, the announced layoff numbers are likely an undercount of the closure’s real impact.
Two other WARN Acts were submitted by FedEx this year in Texas, including 50 layoffs at a facility in the Dallas suburb of Plano, and 305 cuts at its Supply Chain Logistics & Electronics facility in Fort Worth.
According to WARN data compiled by Layoffdata, Fedex has announced 3,761 layoffs via 23 separate notifications this year. The number of WARN Act notifications is higher than at any other point in the dataset going back to 2001. The second highest was in 2023, where 1,916 jobs were axed in 15 notices.
FedEx representative Adam Snyder said that employees would be “eligible for other roles within the company, including at other FedEx facilities in the area.” But there is no apparent guarantee that they will retain their jobs.
FedEx launched a $2 billion cost-reduction plan in 2023 called “Network 2.0,” aimed at combining 650 Fedex Express and 650 FedEx Ground locations into 850 to 900 combined locations. This plan, modeled on a similar one by the company in Canada, seeks to slash jobs and close facilities, consolidating the company’s operations into a smaller number of highly automated facilities. The plan is reportedly 25 percent complete and expected to be completed in May. Previously, FedEx has stated it intends to close 30 percent of package facilities as part of the plan.
More than 1.1 million layoffs have been announced so far by US corporations this year, the highest level since the start of the pandemic and approaching the figure from the first year of the Great Recession in 2008. While the largest components come from the government (as part of the Trump administration’s attack on social programs and corporate regulators) and technology firms, logistics is also playing a leading role.
FedEx’s main private competitor UPS is carrying out a similar plan, the “Network of the Future,” aiming to close 200 facilities and introduce technology with the potential to automate 80 percent of its warehouse jobs. While FedEx is nonunion, the UPS job cuts are being carried out with the support of the Teamsters union; the cuts began almost as soon as a sellout contract passed in 2023. This year alone, UPS has axed 48,000 jobs.
The United States Postal Service (USPS) is in the midst of its own “Delivering for America” consolidation program, which aims to close hundreds of post offices and thousands of routes and automate much of its operations. Related systems are being introduced to impose speedup on letter carriers through the use of Amazon-style AI-tracking programs.
The impact of the relentless cost-cutting has been a series of industrial disasters. On November 4, an aging UPS cargo plane taking off from the company’s main Worldport hub plowed into an industrial area in Louisville, Kentucky, killing 14. At least five USPS have died so far this year, including two letter carriers from apparent heat-related causes. Two distribution workers, Nick Acker and Russell Scruggs, Jr, died last month in separate horrific accidents near Detroit and Atlanta.
In response, the USPS Workers Rank-and-File Committee has launched an independent investigation into Acker and Russell’s deaths. The committee was founded in opposition to the betrayals of the postal union bureaucrats, who by and large openly support Delivering for America.
Behind all of the logistics layoffs is the rapid rise of Amazon’s competing logistics network. The company, which only began offering last-mile delivery around a decade ago, leads the industry with 25 percent of the total US parcel volume, more than combined volume of FedEx and UPS. Other alternatives besides Amazon—such as Walmart, Target, and smaller carriers—have also grown their market share by 3 percent at the cost of FedEx and UPS, accounting for 10 percent of the market by 2024.
The use of third-party contractors (or “Delivery Service Providers” as they are known at Amazon) and Uber-style deliveries using private vehicles marks the further shift towards the highly exploited “gig” economy.
The trade war led by the Trump administration is another major contributing factor to the layoffs. FedEx said that it is moving away from Business to Customer (B2C) e-commerce at a recent in-person event for Wall Street analysts in New York, industry journal Freightwaves reports. Its operating income decreased by $150 million as a result of the pulling of duty-free entry for packages under $800 by the Trump administration. Its operating income has decreased by 6.15 percent between fiscal year 2024 and 2025.
FedEx management highlighted its Business to Business (B2B) customers as a primary source for growth. But the center in Coppell is a B2B center, hinting that the difficulties facing FedEx are far from over even with the shift towards a more B2B centric business model.
Tariffs and relentless cost-cutting will contribute to accelerating layoffs across the US and the world.
In response, workers must launch a global counter-offensive through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC). The IWA-RFC is organizing workers independent of the sellout union bureaucrats to fight for the right to a good-paying job, workers’ control over safety, the defense of immigrant workers and other basic social and democratic rights.
FedEx workers must join this growing movement by founding rank-and-file committees at their own workplaces, comprised of the most trusted workers, to prepare a fight against layoffs.
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