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UPS DRIVERS WON “HISTORIC HEAT PROTECTIONS.” THEY SAY THE COMPANY
HASN’T LIVED UP TO THAT PROMISE.  
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Serena Lin
August 26, 2024
Mother Jones
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_ The contract’s heat safety rules are among the first of their
kind, but some workers say they have brought little relief. _

, Mother Jones illustration; Don & Melinda Crawford/Getty

 

A year after a union contract won “historic heat protections” for
UPS drivers, the Teamsters are still pushing the company to do more to
protect workers in vehicles that can reach
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up to 120 degrees. Multiple employees told _Mother Jones_ their
vehicles are still hot—and dangerous.

For Jeff Schenfeld, a UPS driver working outside of Dallas, a typical
shift requires more than 200 stops, sometimes involving multiple
packages—entering and exiting the truck at least 400 times a day.
“You’re back and forth, back and forth,” he said. In July and
August, when the average high temperature in Dallas is 96 degrees,
Schenfeld dreads rummaging for packages in the back of his truck. 

Because of climate change, summer temperatures have risen
significantly
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across the country. A recent study
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found that heat waves are hotter, last longer, and cover larger areas
than they did 40 years ago. 

Last August, a 57-year-old UPS driver named Chris Begley collapsed
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during his shift in McKinney, Texas, and died at a hospital four days
later. An OSHA investigation summary said that he died of heat stress,
a description that a UPS spokesperson claimed was inaccurate. But
regardless of the official cause of Begley’s death, it underscored
the potential dangers of working in extreme heat for many union
members.  

The Biden administration recently announced an OSHA rule proposal
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to set a national heat safety standard for both indoor and outdoor
workers. Delivery drivers, like workers in construction and
agriculture, are uniquely vulnerable to extreme heat. A _Politico
_analysis
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of OSHA data from 2015 to 2022 found that after construction workers,
delivery and mail workers had the second-highest rates of heat-related
illness. Drivers for Amazon
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and FedEx
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contractors have raised concerns about working in the heat, and
lawmakers recently urged
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the US Postal Service to expand heat protections. 

Last summer, the Teamsters union, which represents more than 340,000
UPS workers, made heat a centerpiece of prolonged contract
negotiations with the shipping company. The agreement, which averted
what could have been an economically devastating strike, promised to
raise
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full-time pay to $170,000 by the end of the five-year agreement. The
company promised to increase airflow and lower temperatures in their
iconic brown package trucks and ensure that all vehicles purchased
after January 1 of this year would have air conditioning. UPS also
vowed to replace 28,000 existing trucks with air conditioned
ones—though the prospect was once described
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company spokesperson as unfeasible because of frequent stops. Today,
only a small portion of the existing fleet has air conditioning. 

“Workers across industries and in virtually every geography are
saying [heat] is a new danger that we are confronted with more and
more days of the year,” Anastasia Christman, a policy analyst at the
National Employment Law Project, said. The UPS agreement is likely the
first private-sector contract to explicitly include heat protections,
she said, calling it “first in class.” 

But promising change and implementing it are two different things, and
one year later, some UPS employees say that ratifying the contract has
not improved their working conditions in summer temperatures. Many
workers who spoke to _Mother Jones _described feeling pressure to keep
up the pace and take fewer breaks, even in extreme heat. 

While the company has made good progress on installing more fans, heat
shields, and induction systems in trucks, air conditioning appears to
be the most intractable change. Teamsters spokesperson Kara Deniz says
the company’s lag in replacing trucks with air conditioned ones is
“unacceptable.” 

“The safety of our employees is our top priority,” Genneviev
Bowman, a UPS spokesperson, told _Mother Jones_. The company said that
managers “are monitoring to make sure they take their breaks,
particularly in hot weather. We’re confident that our policies are
followed by an overwhelming majority of our drivers and management.
And we take corrective action when we become aware that a policy is
not being followed.”

 
UPS spokesperson Jim Mayer said that the company will also “continue
to purchase and deploy new vehicles with AC as quickly as possible.”
UPS said that some trucks with air conditioning had been purchased
this year—though the company would not say how many. In late June,
CNN had reported
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that no new vans had been purchased. 

The union contract also required that the company conduct heat safety
training and allow workers to follow best practices. The company
suggested that I speak with Jeff Wigglesworth, a driver in Phoenix,
Arizona, where average summer temperatures are above 100 degrees.
Wigglesworth is a member of the safety committee at his center and
told me that supervisors are attentive to employee
wellbeing—providing ice and fresh fruit, and conducting “lunch box
checks” to see if people are eating properly. Still, even he said
there are limitations. “We can educate all we want,” he said.
“But it’s their body. They know their body better than I
would.” 

Doing strenuous activity in extreme heat can be dangerous. “If you
combine heavy levels of exertion with exposure to high heat, then the
body can rapidly overheat,” said Robert Harrison, an occupational
health specialist at the University of California, San Francisco.
Harrison said it’s particularly a risk for outdoor workers.

Multiple employees told _Mother Jones_ that their supervisors keep a
close eye on productivity metrics like the number of stops made per
“on-road” hour. Kyle Burroughs, a driver outside of Denver,
described being chastised by a manager for slowing his pace on a hot
day. Burroughs said that experiences like that “discourage people
from being safe” and get in the way of following advice laid out by
the company’s own training, such as taking additional breaks when
overheated. 

 
 
Dallas-area UPS driver Reginald Lewis said that delivery loads often
increase during the summer, which, combined with the heat, makes it
difficult for drivers to complete their routes on time. Lewis said
requests for help often go unmet. “There is a pressure to get the
job done,” he said. “We’re told, ‘We don’t have that many
people on hand. You gotta go out there and try to do it on your
own.’” 

Mayer, the UPS spokesperson, said that “package volumes go up and
down for a variety of reasons, many beyond our control, and we do our
best to manage workloads.”

Nathan Morris, a physiology professor at the University of Colorado,
Colorado Springs, explained that the heat will inevitably affect
worker productivity: “If you try to keep the same work rate and
stress the body out, it’s going to put a huge strain on the heart.
At a certain point, people just can’t work as fast.” And workers
who aren’t given scheduled breaks will likely take unplanned ones,
as one study of occupational heat stress Morris worked on found.
“You’re losing that worker efficiency anyway,” Morris said. 

IN INTERVIEWS, employees emphasized the gap between contract language
and the day-to-day reality of the workplace—which the union is
working to close. Organizers said many UPS workers don’t know the
full extent of the protections guaranteed by last year’s agreement.
Teamsters for a Democratic Union, the organization’s progressive
wing, has distributed wallet heat safety cards
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drivers around the country, reminding them that the contract
“protects your right to protect yourself from heat illness.” 

 
 
Asserting those rights can be difficult for some employees because
enforcement of those rights happens through the potentially risky
process of filing grievances with the union. After the complaint
travels through a formal adjudication process between the union and
the company, it can result in a monetary payout. Burroughs, the
driver in Colorado, said that employees are often afraid that filing a
grievance will negatively affect their career.

Isolated in their own trucks, some delivery drivers might feel that
they are “experiencing the heat alone,” said Beth Breslaw, an
organizer with Teamsters for a Democratic Union. When heat-related
illness is framed by management as an issue of “personal
responsibility,” said Breslaw, it is easy to overlook that workplace
safety is the result of companywide policy. Organizers have been
holding parking lot meetings, before or after shifts, to talk about
heat-related issues, hoping to show workers that extreme heat is a
collective problem—with a collective solution. 

As global temperatures continue their perilous climb, it’s likely
that extreme heat will increasingly become the subject of labor
disputes. Christman, from the National Employment Law Project, said
that climate change is challenging the preexisting framework of
workplace safety. Traditionally, workers have organized around
“specific safety issues”—like a dangerous piece of
equipment—but extreme heat is a pervasive, external problem,
unconfined to a single workplace or geographic area. 

Extreme heat is likely to reshape all workplaces, and it will bring
with it what Christman called an “ideological challenge” on a new
scale. Soon—sooner than we may think—workplaces will not be able
to continue with business as usual. “There’s going to come a point
where those packages aren’t going to get delivered and those trucks
aren’t going to be rolling out, because there’s not going to be
any workers healthy enough to do it,” Christman said. “If workers
aren’t kept safe, companies won’t be able to continue to
function.”

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