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“If and when the Company decides to take the safety of our people seriously, I will consider reinstating the committee,” he wrote in a public letter. The risks for UPS workers and their fight for more protections from the company are emblematic of what workers everywhere - including others in the delivery industry - face with rising temperatures, said Juley Fulcher, worker health and safety advocate at Public Citizen, a nonprofit organization that pushes for national heat protections.
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A temperature reading taken by a driver in the cargo area of a UPS delivery truck on a mid-July afternoon in Florida. Medina said this summer feels hotter, but the company does not adjust its workload based on high temperatures. “There’s times you go home and you’re brain dead because of the heat.”
“This job is physically demanding even without the sun beating down,” said Hector Medina, who has delivered UPS packages in the Tampa area for more than 20 years.
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The company says it has installed venting systems to increase airflow, optimized the roofs for heat reduction and insulation, and provided fans to drivers on request. UPS has taken steps to lessen the heat in its trucks. Federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration inspectors have documented heat indexes of 126, and temperature readings taken by workers in their trucks in Arizona and Florida and provided to NBC News show temperatures above 150 degrees. Some UPS workers say the back of the trucks, which they must go in and out of to retrieve packages, can feel like saunas. The company has weekly safety meetings between workers and management, and said it promptly addresses issues when they are brought to its attention. In a statement, UPS said its drivers are trained to work outdoors and to manage the effects of hot weather, and that the company provides regular heat illness and injury prevention training for employees, as well as water and ice, as part of its “cool solutions” program developed with regulators. “By refusing to implement these safety measures, the company is literally sending drivers out to die in the heat,” said O’Brien. They include providing fans in every truck (rather than by request), cooling neck towels, consistent supplies of water and ice, more breathable uniforms and hiring more drivers to reduce workload.
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The Teamsters issued a public letter last week outlining a series of steps it says UPS should take immediately to improve the safety of its drivers, given the weather. “UPS hasn’t been proactive at all on the topic of heat, and that’s going to have to change,” said Sean M. Heat protections will be one of the key issues in the upcoming negotiations, according to the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which represents the workers. The majority of UPS workers, some 350,000 people, are covered by the biggest union contract in North America, which expires next year. After record earnings last year, the company installed cameras in its delivery trucks but did not change its heat safety protocols, according to the union, compounding long-held grievances about the company’s priorities. UPS is the world’s largest package delivery company, and its ubiquitous brown trucks and warehouses are largely without air conditioning. " UPS workers gathered outside the company’s Foster Avenue facility Thursday in Brooklyn, N.Y., to demand better heat protections. “Left and right people are falling out,” said Jeff Schenfeld, a union steward in Dallas and UPS veteran of 25 years. In response, they are demanding that the company put more safety measures in place. More than a dozen UPS employees and union leaders say this year more workers seem to be getting sick and have been hospitalized because of the heat than ever before.
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