FedEx Supply Chain has issued a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) notice in Tennessee that 611 workers in Memphis will be permanently laid off on October 11, 2025, after car parts manufacturer Cummins Inc. decided to shift a large share of its aftermarket parts distribution to a different provider in Indianapolis. The cuts affect two sites in the area.
FedEx Supply Chain is FedEx’s third-party logistics (3PL) division, distinct from FedEx Express (air) and FedEx Ground (parcel). As a 3PL, it runs customer-dedicated warehousing and fulfillment, receiving and storage, inventory management, pick-pack-ship, kitting/labeling, and returns.
Because these facilities are tied to specific client contracts, jobs rise or fall with the client’s decisions. When a client moves its business to another provider or city, the jobs move too.
Cummins stated that the shift to Indianapolis is aimed at improving efficiency and better supporting customers. For Memphis workers, however, customer relocation means immediate job losses at the old site.
FedEx has said affected employees were notified and may be offered placement assistance, transfers, relocation help, or severance. In practice, even when a transfer is on the table, workers face longer commutes, potential pay and schedule changes, loss of seniority, and the personal costs of uprooting households.
Like the rest of FedEx, these sites are nonunion; therefore, workers lack “bumping rights,” that is, the seniority protection that allows a more-senior, qualified worker to displace (‘bump’) a less-senior worker in another job or shift to avoid layoff and keep pay and seniority.
What is happening in Memphis is not isolated. Earlier this year, FedEx Supply Chain laid off 305 employees in Fort Worth, Texas after a client transferred its logistics operations to a different provider. The company is also shuttering a FedEx Supply Chain facility in Jacksonville, FL, laying off 87 employees at that site.
The layoffs at FedEx 3PLs are part of a downward trend for the sector since the COVID boom in online retail ended and now exacerbated by the Trump administration’s tariff program. Since March of this year, 3PLs including Ryder Logistics, Penske Logistics, and Quiet Logistics have laid off nearly 600 workers in cities throughout the US.
Separate from the FedEx Supply Chain cuts, FedEx slashed 1,000 jobs this year as part of its “Network 2.0” consolidation plan. Since the end of May, the company has closed 100 stations and converted roughly 290 more to an integrated model, with management saying it plans to close about 30 percent of US package distribution facilities within two years as part of a multi-year, $2 billion cost-reduction program.
These cuts are part of an ongoing jobs bloodbath in the logistics sector. On April 29, UPS said it would eliminate 20,000 jobs in 2025 and close 73 facilities by the end of June as part of a sweeping Network of the Future reconfiguration. This is in addition to the 12,000 job cuts announced last year.
In 2023, UPS turned aggressively toward automation of its operations in order to lessen its “dependence on labor” according to UPS president of US operations Nando Cesarone. A key factor in the job cuts is the “labor certainty” provided to management by the 2023 Teamsters contract, hailed by the bureaucracy as “historic.” It contained no language to protect jobs as UPS unleashed its draconian plans for restructuring.
UPS announced an early retirement/buyout offer in July for full-time drivers in its efforts to cut labor. The company had to push the buyout deadline back from July 31 to August 14, suggesting a lack of interest on the part of workers in the deal.
The massive culling of logistics jobs is unfolding in the context of uncertainty and destabilization caused by Trump’s tariff program and the acceleration of his fascistic attacks on democratic rights.
With the Trump administration’s protectionism receiving the support of the unions themselves, every aspect of the logistics network is in flux, which for workers, means overtime one week and shortened shifts or layoffs the next as global manufacturers, shippers, importers, and transportation companies navigate Trump’s tariff gambit.
The cost of all of this falls entirely on the working class. Trump’s measures have already driven up the prices on consumer goods. Job cuts will increase across all sectors and cause worsening working conditions and deteriorating workplace safety as workers are doing more work with fewer hands and less oversight and safety regulations.
Workers must take the initiative to form rank-and-file committees in every workplace and community, independent of the two capitalist parties and the union apparatus, as democratic centers for coordinating opposition to layoffs, wage cuts, unsafe working conditions and the dismantling of democratic rights.
Supply chain workers across companies, warehouses, hubs, ports and delivery networks should establish committees in every facility to link their struggles, share information freely, defend jobs and hours, and oppose closures, forced transfers, and job loss due to automation.
In its Labor Day Perspective, the World Socialist Web Site wrote:
The working class possesses immense social power to shut down production, bring the entire economy to a halt and overthrow the ruling class. But this power can only be realized through independent organization and political clarity.
Under conditions in which Trump is transforming the United States into a military-police dictatorship, the working class must build its own independent strategy and leadership. Rank-and-file committees provide the means for workers to organize and fight for their interests against a system that subordinates human need to private profit.