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 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 across the country. A recent study 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 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 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 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 and FedEx contractors have raised concerns about working in the heat, and lawmakers recently urged 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 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 refurbish 28,000 existing trucks with air conditioning—though the prospect was once described by a 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 refurbishing trucks with air conditioning 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 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 to 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.”
