Amid rising temperatures last year, unionized UPS workers made heat an issue – but despite a key contract win, workers say little progress has been made

The company’s dark aluminum package vans can amplify outdoor heat, with workers having recorded temperatures over 120F (49C) in the vehicles.

The heat is not merely uncomfortable but also dangerous, with drivers suffering heatstroke on the job each summer and incidents turning fatal in some cases. Pacic has seen these dangers in his own region: this month, a UPS driver was hospitalized after getting into an accident while experiencing heat exhaustion, union officials say. And last August, Chris Begley, a 28-year UPS veteran, suffered a medical emergency while driving in 103F heat. He died four days later.

Amid spiking temperatures last summer, 340,000 unionized UPS workers made heat a key issue during labor negotiations with their employer. They secured a major win when, as part of a new union contract, the company agreed that each of the iconic chocolate-brown package vans it purchased after 1 January would include air conditioning – part of a commitment to equip 28,000 package cars with the cooling devices by the contract’s end on 31 July 2028.

Today, however, the union says UPS has made little progress toward that goal. CNN reported last month that it has not purchased any new vans since 1 January, and as such, only a small fraction of its delivery drivers have access to cooling technology.

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https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/local/heat-blamed-north-texas-ups-driver-illness-work-deliveries/287-c92cb62d-7e54-46ad-9d06-1cc76d811ba1
https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/22/business/ups-delivery-vans-air-conditioning/index.html
https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/ups-driver-crashes-in-north-texas-due-to-alleged-heat-exhaustion/3623936/
https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7ggnv/ups-drivers-are-sharing-heat-readings-of-120f-inside-their-trucks
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/aug/23/ups-delivery-workers-air-conditioning
https://www.kwtx.com/2021/10/28/family-waco-ups-worker-who-died-job-file-wrongful-death-lawsuit/

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4 points

Would you fucking figure out how to do proper spoiler tags!?

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3 points

It would be the height of irony if it works fine for me on kbin but on lemmy, where the bot lives, it’s messed up somehow.

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5 points

The issue is almost always whatever app they’re using not processing them correctly.

They work just fine for me on the lemmy.world website directly, and in Summit.

Someone did a fairly deep comparison of a bunch of different apps to compare their formatting support, and it was bad. I can’t find it due to the poor built-in search, and lack of good federated content search by regular search engines. I should have saved it for reference.

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2 points

Works on my machine. Are you not using the normal lemmy web UI or something?

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1 point

I’m using boost for lemmy.

Every single other spoiler tag works fine, this bot is literally the only time I’ve seen a spoiler tag fail.

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