Reported by: Bill PriceWeb produced by: Ian Preuth Photographed by: Scott WegenerThe future of over 6,000 jobs at the Wilmington Air Park in Clinton County could be at risk, as the parent company of DHL said it will radically restructure its US package and cargo delivery services.
Instead of relying on ABX Air out of Wilmington, DHL said they are negotiating with UPS to take over much of the air transport of packages across the United States from ABX Air.
The president of ABX Air, John Graber, told the Wilmington News Journal newspaper, the restructuring could eliminate from 6,000 to 6,100 ABX Air jobs in Wilmington. He said it was "a grim day for ABX Air, frankly for the Wilmington community, for the county and for the state."
ABX Air, which was created from the Airborne Express delivery service, is the 9th largest employer in Greater Cincinnati and the Tri-State. A recent Cincinnati Business Courier survey said ABX Air employs over 7,500 people.
Night shift sorting workers like James Garner said they feel betrayed by the DHL restructuring. Garner said he and thousands of other package sorters worked through numerous problems starting in 2005, when DHL moved operations out of the Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky International Airport and tried to integrate its operations with Airborne Express in Wilmington.
Garner said over the last year, he and his coworkers have been congratulated numerous times for increasing productivity and cutting work hours overnight. But now, Garner said he wonders if all that extra effort was really worth it.
Garner said on Wednesday night, he and other workers were told that DHL will no longer need as many as 39 of ABX Air's DC-9 jets in a first phase. Then several months later, DHL would pull its night sorting operations out of Wilmington and transfer them to UPS and presumedly, its main hub in Louisville, Kentucky.
Meanwhile, Wilmington city officials aren't giving up hope for possibly keeping some or most of the Airpark/ABX jobs, possibly with UPS taking over some of the operations. As one city council member said, negotiations between DHL and UPS are only now starting and the restructuring plans may change over the coming weeks and months.
