UPS Drivers Are Battling Deadly Heat—Without A.C. in Their Trucks
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 preempts 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, 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.” 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.”
