"UPS Drivers Are Battling Deadly Heat—Without A.C. in Their Trucks" 25 June 2025

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As part of the contract the [International Brotherhood of Teamsters] 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...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... 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.”...

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...

.UPS’s intense demands on its employees...don’t change in a heat wave...Between 2015 and 2022, at least 143 UPS employees were hospitalized for heat-related injuries. Some have died...

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...

In a public comment on the proposed rule, Cormac Gilligan, UPS’s Global Head of Health and Safety, 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.”...

That specificity is in keeping with the elaborate array of surveillance technology that UPS has packed onto its trucks....

The Teamsters’s 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...