Holidays become a blur of hiring for UPS

ONTARIO, Calif. — The conveyor belts, nearly 22 miles of them, merge into a single thrumming blur.

And the pace of overnight package movement during the 5 p.m.-to-11 p.m. Twilight Sort, which already was difficult to imagine, shifts to another level entirely.

This is the yearly triathlon of the holiday shipping season at places like UPS' Ontario International Airport hub, the Atlanta company's second-largest U.S. facility and its West Coast-Asian trade gateway.

Altogether, about 1,700 seasonal hires have swelled the ranks, sorting through, loading and delivering packages to more than 40,000 ZIP codes at a pace that rises from 70,000 packages per hour to 85,000.

On Wednesday, this year's peak delivery day, UPS estimates its world network will handle a record 21 million boxes filled with pineapple cilantro votive candles, limited-edition Santa ornaments and the like.

In all, the big three in the overnight delivery world — UPS, FedEx and DHL — will move nearly 33 million packages on their peak days.

"While the rest of the country is settling for the night, we're just starting to roll," said Bob Benavidez, UPS ramp training manager.

The race to the holidays has become even more challenging as more and more business customers give up their own warehouses and use hubs operated by UPS, the world's busiest delivery service, as staging areas for their products.

"This is the fastest-growing part of the overnight-shipping business, especially during peak season. It's a major corporate shift. They are becoming the logistics arms for their customers," said John Husing, an economist who focuses on the warehouse and distribution industry.

"The future of American capitalism is doing the things you are good at and contracting out the rest," Husing said. "Why run a distribution operation when what you are really good at is making scented candles?"

It's a twist on the flurry of activity that is the peak retail-shipping season for overnight-delivery companies.

In years past, companies such as UPS would ramp up with thousands of temporary workers who would help sort packages, make deliveries or assist drivers. That still happens.

Worldwide, UPS will add 60,000 seasonal workers as it expands its business by more than one-third from the normal 15 million packages a day during non-peak times.

But UPS needs even more workers because it is assembling customers' products and orders, labeling and packaging them for shipment, a business it calls Supply Chain Solutions.

Launched in 2002, the warehousing operation was expanded to Southern California last year.

The change has meant massive growth at the UPS Southern California hub, which includes the 48-acre Ontario site and other operations.

"We had another building that was about 400,000 square feet and we have blown out of that space completely and needed a bigger footprint. Now, we'll add another 605,000-square-foot warehouse by July that will give us about 1.8 million square feet altogether," said James Tagnozzini, director of UPS' Southern California Supply Chain Solutions from a new 765,000-square-foot complex.

The downside of this burgeoning set of relationships for a company like Illuminations of Petaluma is there is no warehouse next door that they can walk into at any time.

Still, it is finding that a fairly painless transition, given the results.

"It makes things quite a bit easier for us," said Sue Brown, director of logistics and inventory control for Illuminations, which sells scented candles and of household decorations through retail stores, catalogs and online.

"We don't have to manage extra labor for the holidays. UPS does that for us. We don't have to manage a warehouse. UPS does that for us," Brown said.

"The outsourcing was a very good decision for us," she said. "We needed the expertise in this area."

Brown said Illuminations will ship in one day during peak season what it normally sells every five days.

To pull off such a surge, warehouses have had to shed the traditional image of workers riding around in old forklifts, armed with clipboards to help with manual searches of the shelves.

Instead, the jobs have gone high-tech.

Simple fork lifts and clipboards have been replaced.

Now, the lifts carry wireless computer terminals.

Workers, who are paid up to $15 an hour, plus benefits, assemble orders with handheld "RF guns," radio-frequency devices that precisely guide "order pickers" along the shortest routes among the shelves to every item on each order.

"We call it a cluster pick. It's almost mistake proof," Tagnozzini said.

Some hired for the seasonal work wind up staying with UPS, which touts itself as a place where employees can start at the bottom and spend their entire careers with the company.

One of those who joined during the holiday rush 10 years ago was Michelle Page Dossey, who remembers "I did it for two years and it just about killed me. I lost 15 pounds doing it. I lost all the baby fat."

Dossey was a waitress and student who needed more money and health benefits for her 9-month-old baby. Now, she works as communications supervisor for UPS in Southern California.

"It taught me things I needed to know about life," she said. "It really toughens you up."