UPS Workers Share Horror Stories About Driving in Heat

It was Mike Dunaj’s first day on the job as a UPS package delivery driver, and he was absolutely stoked. It was better pay, more hours. He’d be driving around and admiring the beautiful scenery of Florida in August—this job was a huge upgrade from working in the company’s warehouse.

Dunaj and his supervisor hopped into the truck to run his first route.

“Obviously, my first time on the road, I was extremely nervous,” Dunaj said. “The whole day [my supervisor] is just sitting there with his face buried in his phone. He’s ‘rush, rush, hurry, hurry, hurry.’ And this whole time, I’m just drenched in sweat.”

Sweating in southwest Florida in August? Not surprising. But the heat soon began to get to Dunaj. By the time he finished his route, he said, his foot was cramped so badly that he couldn’t hit the brake. He asked his supervisor if he could go home.

“I started getting real dizzy, and I started driving,” Dunaj said. “I made it probably not even a mile, and I just started vomiting on myself. I came to a light and opened my door and then vomited outside some more. I mean, at that point, I thought about going off to the side and just calling an ambulance. But I thought, ‘I only live 10 minutes from here. Let’s try.’”

“It was a very long 10 minutes,” he continued. ”When I got home, I didn’t say a word. I walked in the door, my wife looked at me, and she said I was white as a ghost.”

Dunaj crawled to the bathroom and threw up until he had nothing left. “When I tried to stand up, my hamstrings would lock up and cramp up,” he said. “And then my hands turned into claws, my biceps, my deltoids, even my eyelids. [My wife] kept trying to bring me water. But every time I would take a sip, I would throw up.”

“My head was throbbing so bad from the dehydration,” he said. “But I still had to call in the next day.”

Dunaj’s story is extreme, but the struggles he faces aren’t new. In late June, a UPS driver from Arizona named Esteban Chavez died seemingly from heatstroke after being passed out in his truck for 20 minutes. It was the day after his 24th birthday. UPS drivers have been suffering from long exposure to heat during the summer for years, but the company only recently began to get public criticism for it. Drivers at the end of July were sharing temperature readings of over 120 degrees Fahrenheit inside their trucks. A video on Twitter in late July of a UPS driver collapsing on somebody’s front porch while delivering a package sparked outrage and concern.

Motherboard spoke to eight workers from UPS locations around the country, who said they had experienced extreme heat at work. Motherboard agreed to keep some of the workers anonymous because they feared retaliation.

A second worker from Florida was doing their route normally in early August, drinking water, when they started to slow down due to the heat, they told Motherboard.

“My body started feeling some chills,” they recalled. “My leg was cold, my body was hot. It was really uncomfortable.”

They called in to their manager, who told them to go find some shade to wait in until another driver could take their route. When they returned the truck to the facility, they said, “it was very uncomfortable to drive. I threw up as soon as I got out.”

The driver said they were given prescription pills by their primary doctor and two days off work to recover, and went back to work the next week. “But I wasn’t good,” they said. “Every day when I was waking up, I was waking up super tired.” On another day that next week, the symptoms started again. Because the weather changed to a cool rain, they were able to finish the route, but they still felt sick.

“It was something wrong with my head,” they said. They went to the emergency room after that day, where they were diagnosed with work-related heat syncope. They were referred to a neurologist, and have yet to go to the appointment, according to documentation provided to Motherboard.

To some extent, anyone who is delivering packages is going to be exposed to the elements, and the job necessitates carrying heavy or unwieldy items from the back of a truck to people’s houses all day. The unofficial motto often attributed to the United States Postal Service, for example, is “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” Motherboard has written extensively about how Amazon drivers have had to pee in plastic bottles, have faced racism and threats on the job, and are subjected to often dangerous route planning.

UPS said at the time of Chavez’s death, and has continued to reiterate, that it would be “ineffective” to put air conditioning in the trucks. In an earlier statement to Motherboard, a spokesperson wrote that because the vehicle stops around 130 times a day on average, air conditioning would not be useful.

“We have studied heat mitigation with our vehicles and integrated forced air systems with venting to create air flow around the driver and cargo areas,” they continued. “We optimize the roof of vehicles to minimize heat in the cargo area, alongside insulating the roof of the cab. We also offer fans to drivers upon request.”

Drivers say the back of the truck has no air movement at all.

“When you pop that bulkhead door to get in the back to get your packages out, our trucks are all metal, so it’s literally an oven, a hot box,” Dunaj said. “Going back there and trying to find a package—if it’s not right there, literally after ten, 15 seconds, you start to panic because it’s so hot. But you have to keep digging until you find it. And there’s no way to get any air circulation back there.”

Dunaj said even just air movement would help mitigate the heat. “They could put a giant fan in the back of a truck, so there’s air circulation,” he said.

The fans offered by UPS are a part of the union contract. After a request, the fan would sit in the front cab. But that has also been a point of contention for the workers. A driver from the  metro-Philadelphia area, who requested to remain anonymous to prevent corporate backlash, said it took a long time for the fans to be installed.

“The first year, we put in requests for all the trucks,” they said. “We didn’t get any fans the first year. The second year we did it, we still aren’t getting the fans. We start going harder and harder, because every year is getting hotter. We finally get these fans and it’s just one little fan all the way in the left hand corner on the dashboard, pointing at your left elbow.”

Drivers in Teamsters Local 804, the New York branch of the International Teamsters Union that UPS workers are organized under, had similar issues. Elliot Lewis, a union steward there, posted a photo to Twitter of a worker’s request to get a fan installed. The mechanic’s response read, “Can’t install fan. It’s a corporate decision.”

When asked about the incident, a UPS spokesperson said it “should not have occurred” and that they had taken steps to fix it. Anthony Rosario, another driver in the local, said that returned request slips for fans now said the parts were on backorder, and that they would be arriving in October. He said that would be “too late” to help deal with the summer heat.

In a statement to Motherboard, a UPS spokesperson said that the company had increased their response to the summer heat by “providing additional water, ice, electrolyte replacement beverages and fruits with high water content.”

They also said UPS was “distributing 260,000 new uniforms with wicking dry-fit shirts and performance fabric shorts, making more than 125,000 cooling towels available, [and] accelerating the installation of fans in UPS vehicles across the country.”

The metro-Philadelphia driver joked that the uniforms were like “wearing cardboard.”

“All these efforts and collaboration are designed to ensure that every UPS employee makes the most important stop daily stop [sic], which is when they safely arrive home after their workday,” the spokesperson continued in their email.

But drivers say the company is focused more on productivity than anything else. “Production, production, production is all they want,” the metro-Philadelphia driver said. “Our new CEO is all about numbers and all about stocks.” The company’s CEO, Carol B. Tomé, took over in 2020 after serving on the board of directors for 17 years.

“It’s not about customer service,” they said. “It’s not about a name. It’s not about the driver anymore, like it used to be back in the day.”

Dunaj said the backs of the trucks are often over-stuffed with packages. “We shouldn’t have this many packages,” he said. “The trucks shouldn’t look like that.”

UPS drivers told Motherboard that, despite the difficult work in the heat, the pay is famously very good because the company is unionized. According to a UPS spokesperson, full-time package delivery drivers “average $93,000 a year in wages plus an additional $50,000 in health, welfare and pension contributions.”

“We have the best health insurance you can buy,” Dunaj said. Once a driver hits top pay, they would make around $41 an hour, with $60.50 overtime, he continued.

Workers have begun to organize for better conditions. “At this point, it’s been going on for too long,” Rosario from local 804 said. “People have dealt with it, but we’re not in the Stone Age anymore. The company has made billions over this pandemic and there is no reason why they can’t better conditions for the employees that work for this company.”

“[UPS has] provided me with a nice life,” the metro-Philadelphia driver said. “I just don’t want to see one of my friends, one of my coworkers go down and die.”