By the time Pat got out on the road in Long Island on Tuesday morning, temperatures outside were still in the mid-80s. A thermometer in the cab of his UPS delivery truck had hit 110 degrees. Its translucent white roof—featured on older versions of the iconic brown haulers—is meant in part to create more visibility for drivers to search around for packages, since it doesn’t need to be lit during the day. “They’re supposed to reflect the sun. But it’s fiber glass, and it transfers the heat right into the vehicles,” he told me just after his shift ended around 7 p.m., comparing the back of his truck to a sardine can. “If you have to look for two or three packages, the heat gets to you. There’s no ventilation,” he said. “It’s crazy hot.” By noon, as Pat continued ferrying packages to customers, the thermometer in his truck hit 120. By 1 it had climbed to 125. It may well have gotten hotter, but the thermometer “doesn’t show anything over that.”
That plastic yellow thermometer was provided by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the union that represents 350,000 UPS drivers and warehouse workers around the country. (Like all the UPS workers I spoke to for this story, Pat asked to be referred to only by his first name for fear of retaliation from UPS.) As part of the contract the union negotiated with UPS in 2023, the company is now required to provide workers with several protections against the kind of extreme heat many of them are facing across the U.S. right now. Those include readily available clean water and ice, as well as access to “cool zones” and the right to take and extend breaks when they feel overheated. The contract further mandated UPS to install fans in the largely non-air-conditioned warehouses where packages are sorted and loaded, and in the front of vehicles. Delivery trucks have also been outfitted with heat exhaust shields and vents. UPS Teamsters, though, are still waiting on some of these historic protections.
UPS is required to equip its fleet with at least 28,000 new air conditioned delivery trucks by the time the current contract expires in 2028; toward that end, all new vans UPS purchases after January 1, 2024 are supposed to have air conditioning. As of last summer, CNN reported, it hadn’t bought any. UPS Brand Management Representative Becca Hunnicut did not directly answer my questions about whether UPS has purchased any new delivery vehicles equipped with air conditioning since the beginning of 2024 and if any its delivery trucks currently have air conditioning. She wrote over email that the company is “installing air conditioning in all new delivery vehicles we buy and adding them as quickly as possible,” adding that UPS does not “publicly share the number of vehicles we purchase” and that it is “prioritizing deployment in the hottest regions.”
Given the lack of federal heat protections for workers, union contracts are one of the few routes for employees to ensure they stay out of harm’s way in extreme heat. As UPS drivers have learned, though, winning those protections on paper is only part of the fight. Making sure the company follows through on its promises—and encouraging co-workers to take advantage of the rights they’ve won—is an ongoing battle. For the last two weeks, Pat and other UPS workers across the U.S. who are active in a rank-and-file network of Teamsters members, Teamsters for a Democratic Union, have organized early-morning meetings in the parking lots outside of UPS warehouses to inform drivers and indoor workers alike about the protections their contract provides them against extreme heat.
Drivers for UPS handle hundreds of packages a day, working shifts that can last up to 14 hours. Isaac, a delivery driver in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, says he typically works about 11 hours a day. In that time, he usually delivers around 350 packages. His route includes several large office buildings downtown, with air conditioning that provided a welcome respite from temperatures that climbed into the nineties this week. That, Isaac said, makes him lucky: “A lot of my coworkers deliver out in the ‘burbs or the country, where they’re basking in the heat all day.”
Still, even slightly cooler routes are no walk in the park; a thermostat in the back of his truck reached 110 degrees earlier this week. “The second you step in the back of your truck you’re gonna start sweating within 10 seconds of being back there,” he told me, “and you’re going to be back there for more than 10 seconds.”
Heatstroke officially sets in when the body’s internal temperature reaches 104 degrees. As temperatures outside start to approach the body’s typical resting temperature—98.6 degrees Fahrenheit—it sweats, and works to bring blood closer to the surface in order to cool us off. That means more stress on the heart, which can lead to cardiac arrest. Over time, as the heart continues to pump faster, less blood and oxygen makes it into the gut. That can allow toxins stored there to leech out into the rest of the body. White blood cells can react to those like an invading virus, clustering around them and forming blood clots that can lead to multiple organ failure and death. For those who work physically demanding jobs, especially, muscle tissues can break down and enter the bloodstream, releasing proteins that clog the kidneys. Dehydration strains the kidneys, too, and can cause them to fail.
UPS conducts regular trainings to make workers aware of early stages of heat exhaustion and dehydration, such as headaches, nausea, rapid breathing, and delirium. Besides jugs, ice and water, the company also distributes sweat towels, hydration packets and some protective clothing, and posts heat-safety information around its warehouses. UPS’s intense demands on its employees, though—which have mounted since online retailing picked up during Covid-19 lockdowns—don’t change in a heat wave. As Isaac explains, drivers might instinctually try to pick up the pace in the heat to finish up their routes faster, sacrificing safety concerns along the way. “Maybe instead of putting the packages on the cart to help you take that pressure off your body, you’ll grab them by hand. As you go in and out of your truck you might skip grabbing your handrail, and jump in and out of the truck,” he said. Between 2015 and 2022, at least 143 UPS employees were hospitalized for heat-related injuries. Some have died.
On a day when temperatures are in the upper 90s, Mike—a UPS delivery driver outside of Orlando, Florida—says that by the early evening he can start to feel confused and disoriented. That makes it harder to find packages, meaning more time in the oven-like back cab. “I have times where I have to pull over and take a break just to try to cool down, and fan off and go to the gas station and get in the coolers,” he told me. “I can’t remember how many times I’ve had to be taken off the road because I wasn’t with it mentally.” In the summer, he says, it’s common for temperatures in the back of his truck to reach 130 degrees.
“I was a landscaping and construction worker. I was younger in those days and just powered through it. As I’m getting older, even with all the training, it creeps up on you,” he said.
According to the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA), “exposure to environmental heat” accounted for just under half (48 percent) of severe injury reports from couriers and express delivery workers since 2015. Yet heat-related injuries and deaths are notoriously difficult to quantify. The real numbers could be even higher. Overheated workers might go home to rest in air conditioning, only to pass away hours later. Such deaths aren’t always recorded as heat-related on death certificates. Symptoms can also mount over time, too. Texas UPS driver Christopher Begley, for instance, spent several days at home after passing out while delivering packages in Texas in August 2023; after a few days, he collapsed at home and was admitted to the hospital, where his organs shut down. In one of many such payouts, OSHA ordered UPS to pay a $66,000 fine after its investigation found that the company had failed to provide access to medical care. While Begley’s widow maintains his death was the result of heat exhaustion, UPS claimed he died because of an issue with his heart.
OSHA mandates that employers provide for a safe workplace environment, but there are still no specific federal protections around heat. The Biden administration proposed just such a rule last year that would mandate water and rest breaks above a certain heat index, accounting for both temperature and humidity. It wasn’t finalized by the time Trump took office, and OSHA last week initiated public hearings on the rule that will last until early July. While some experts take the fact that it hasn’t already been killed as a hopeful sign, others fear the White House could finalize a weaker version that pre-empts states and municipalities from implementing their own standards. In recent years, Republican-controlled state governments in Texas and Florida have barred towns and cities there from implementing local workplace heat protections. Adding to advocates’ worries about the rule’s future, Trump has nominated former UPS and Amazon executive David Keeling to lead OSHA. During Keeling’s three years as the company’s top safety official, ending in 2021, OSHA records show that about 50 UPS workers were “seriously injured” by heat exposure and required hospitalization.
In a public comment on the proposed rule, UPS’s Global Head of Health and Safety, Cormac Gilligan, urged OSHA to “remove prescriptive thresholds in favor of a more flexible, performance-oriented approach,” and allow companies to develop their own “customized heat safety solutions.” His reference to “prescriptive thresholds” presumably refers to requirements in the proposed rule that would mandate that employers provide 15-minute breaks every two hours once the heat index reaches 90 degrees. Employers, Gilligan argued, are best positioned to “know their employee populations and circumstances,” including “metabolic work rate, clothing, baseline acclimatization, sleep, hydration, previous heat illness, medical conditions, resting metabolic rate, physical fitness, and more.”
That specificity is in keeping with the elaborate array of surveillance technology that UPS has packed onto its trucks. Outward-facing cameras installed since 2022 monitor drivers’ decisions on the road, and blare noise based on their behavior. “If you take a sip of water it’ll say you’re distracted driving,” another delivery driver on Long Island, Dave, told me. “There are sensors on the doors. There are sensors on the seatbelts. The ignition has a sensor,” Mike said. DIADs—handheld computers used to collect customer signatures for certain deliveries, communicate with supervisors and receive trainings—are equipped with GPS, and track which buttons are pressed. Mike recalled being summoned to a supervisor’s office for questioning about two minutes that hadn’t been accounted for at a certain delivery address the day prior. “We saw within 13 seconds you opened your door. You shut your truck off, and took your seatbelt off,” he paraphrased his supervisor as saying. “They have that timed out all within seconds.”
The Teamsters’ contract with UPS limits the company’s ability to discipline drivers based on surveillance data. That second-by-second tracking, however, can discourage workers from taking breaks when they start to feel overheated or dehydrated. As trucks have gotten smarter, their loads have gotten heavier, and summers even hotter thanks to climate change. The summer months used to be a relatively slow period for UPS compared to the winter holiday rush. “With the volumes that we are going out with right now, every vehicle looks like Christmas to me,” Jorge, who’s delivered for UPS outside of Orlando for more than 20 years, told me. “Right now there are a lot of trucks that our drivers can’t even walk through,” entailing more time in the back. He jokes that, with temperatures in the backs of some cabs routinely reaching 150 degrees, “the plan is to see who can bake cookies first.” Whereas the worst of Orlando’s swampy conditions usually starts up around July 4, “two or three months ago we started feeling the heat get really bad.” That heat, he said, is the “number one” issue for his union.
“I’ve definitely noticed that the summers have gotten warmer,” Isaac, in Milwaukee, told me. “You’ll always get those peak months in August. But it seems like that ‘peak’ month has expanded a little bit more.” Conditions like the ones he drove through this week, he added, would “normally be peak heat, and we’re getting it all the way in June. The summers have started lasting a little bit longer.”
Dave, who’s driven for UPS for six years on far-east Long Island, helped lead a parking lot meeting this week letting drivers and warehouse workers know they’re entitled to breaks and medical attention, and encouraging them to stay safe and slow down as needed. During his shift on Monday, Dave took two cooling breaks and drank all of the nearly three gallons of water he’d packed in his cooler, plus a few Gatorades. “I’m still fatigued. As physical as our job is, the constant push happening to deliver faster—to keep up what they have determined as a safe pace—is ridiculous,” he said.
As Dave and every other driver I spoke with continue to wait on the company to deliver air conditioned trucks, they’ll keep braving dangerous temperatures. “As far as I’m concerned they have enough money to retrofit all of their vehicles in two or three years,” he said. Earlier this year, UPS announced that it plans to lay off 20,000 employees, cut $3.5 billion in costs, and deliver $1 billion to shareholders in the form of stock buybacks. “A billion dollar company,” Dave added, “shouldn’t have people dying on the road.”
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