Is driving for UPS worth it? Let’s look at the numbers.

This week’s issue of the New Yorker magazine includes a long-form article titled, ‘UPS and the Package Wars.’ Its subtitle is a lot more provocative: ‘The company offers old-fashioned middle-class jobs and is enjoying record profits. So why is a strike looming?’ And the text of the web link is the clever, pithy phrase, ‘Can UPS still deliver a middle-class life?’

The New Yorker story does a great job laying out many of the complexities of labor-management relations at United Parcel Service, using the UPSers and warehouses of the New York City metropolitan area as a case study. It touches on a lot of the different topics I’ve already addressed in my blog.

Early on in the piece, the author states that the average UPS driver earns $95,000 per year. When I first read that I asked myself, is this true? The average UPS driver earns $95,000 per year?

You should know, dear reader, that I do not make anywhere close to $95,000 per year as a UPS driver. I have never made that much in any year of my working life. To me, ninety-five thousand dollars is still a lot of money.

At the same time, however, I’m counting down the months until I make it to top rate. If, as I hope, I’ve become a Regular Package Car Driver by then, under the current contract I’ll earn around $42/hour. Forty-two dollars, times 40 hours per week, times 52 weeks, equals $87,360. Throw in a little overtime and the $95k figure sounds accurate enough.

Annual earnings of $95,000 or more are a real enough possibility, near enough in my future, that I’m motivated to keep going, even though I’m only two years into the four-year wage progression. I probably wouldn’t have started this job, or continued in it for any length of time, without that expectation. And I’m probably not the only driver to feel that way.

I’ve already written that half of the drivers in my building have been driving for less than five years. They haven’t yet made it to top rate, or have only made it in the past year or so. But that means that the other half have been driving for five years or more. At top rate, it’s reasonable to expect that those drivers are indeed earning $95,000 or more per year.

In fact, there’s at least one driver in my building who wanted to earn $150,000 in 2022. It had been a personal goal of his. Last week, when I asked him if he attained that goal, he told me that he did, with an extra ninety dollars for good measure.

Since wages are set and made public in the collective bargaining agreement, there’s no reason to be secretive about how much money you make. Any Teamster at UPS can figure that out about any other Teamster. There’s no taboo about asking or answering questions related to earnings.

All this talk about money made me curious. How much did I make driving for UPS in 2022? And how did that compare with what I made in 2021, my first full year of driving?

So I went back through all 104 weekly pay stubs from the past two years. I entered all the hours worked and wages earned into an Excel spreadsheet. Here’s what I came up with:

Year	Regular Hours	Overtime Hours	Other Hours	Total Earnings	Effective Hourly Rate
2021	1807.97 (34.77/week)	843.69 (16.22/week)	129.54	$66,057.90	$23.75
2022	1763.44 (33.91/week)	609.33 (11.72/week)	285.87	$65,820.27	$24.68

The results are a bit counterintuitive, and yet they still make sense to me. I earned $237.63 less in 2022 than I did in 2021, but I also was paid for 122.56 fewer hours, year over year. Thus I earned roughly the same amount of money, despite working roughly three fewer workweeks.

The contrasts are starkest in my Overtime Hours and Other Hours columns. While I was still working, on average, around 34 or 35 hours of straight time per week, my average overtime fell from slightly more than 16, to slightly less than 12 hours per week. That’s a decrease from a 51-hour to a 45.5-hour workweek, on average.

Meanwhile, my Other Hours total – hours the company paid me for that I didn’t work – more than doubled. That’s because I had only five personal days to spend during 2021, versus those same five days plus two vacation weeks during 2022. I also received 92 hours of paid sick time in 2022, versus only 40 hours in 2021. The hours of holiday time, guaranteed-time (when I punched out before completing an eight-hour shift), and production bonuses (for completing my route in less time than allowed), changed very little year-over-year.

My takeaway from all these numbers is pretty straightforward: I shouldn’t expect my total earnings to change appreciably until I hit top rate. That’s because my total hours worked should continue to decline as I become an increasingly more expensive driver.

In other words, what I don’t gain in pay – yet – I should gain in work-life balance. Emphasis on should here. I know better than to make any presumptions or promises. Especially with the very real possibility of a strike, injury, or both.

Being paid by the hour has an upside and a downside. The upside is, obviously, the more you work, the more you earn. The downside is there’s only so many hours in a day – for work, rest, and life. The tradeoff between time and money is very clear.

That driver who made $150,090 last year? You only need to do the math to figure out that that was a lot of hours worked. Almost certainly more hours than I worked last year. More than I care to work in any year. That’s not sustainable for me. Probably not for anyone.

I appreciate the Teamster wage scale that I enjoy at UPS. I also appreciate the excellent Teamster benefits. Those are both easy to quantify in terms of dollars and cents. But hours worked are also easily quantifiable. And they should be part of the overall equation of whether a given job is ‘worth it.’ It should be about both money and time.