UPS Union workers approved a tentative contract agreement Tuesday that was reached last month with its leaders.

The Teamsters said that 86% of the votes cast were in favor of ratifying the contract, the highest vote margin for a contract in the history of Teamsters at UPS.

The union represents roughly 340,000 UPS workers. Officials also said that more than 40 supplemental agreements were ratified, with the exception of one that covers around 170 member in the state of Florida. The national master agreement will go into effect as soon as that supplement is renegotiated and approved.

Voting on the new five-year contract began August 3rd and ended Tuesday, setting a new standard for pay and benefits.

After negotiations broke down in early July, UPS reached a tentative contract agreement with the Teamsters shortly before an August 1st deadline, avoiding a potentially severe interruption to package deliveries for million across the U.S.

Under the tentative agreement, both full-time and part-time union workers will get $2.75 more per hour in 2023, and $7.50 more in total by the end of the five-year contract. Starting hourly pay for part-time employees also got bumped up to $21.

UPS says that by the end of the new contract, the average UPS full-time driver will make about $170,000 annually in pay and benefits, though it was not made immediately clear how much of that figure benefits account for.

The delivery company also agreed to make Martin Luther King Jr. Day a full holiday, end forced overtime on drivers’ days off and stop using driver-facing cameras in cabs, among a host of other issues. It eliminated a two-tier wage system for drivers and tentative deals on safety issues were also reached, including equipping more trucks with air conditioning.

According to analysts, UPS ships an estimated 24 million packages daily, or roughly a 25% of all U.S. parcel volume. UPS officials stated that this is equal to about 6% of the nation’s GDP.

[Photo Credit: Reuters]