Following months of negotiations with Teamsters, UPS announced in June that it would install air conditioning in new trucks starting next year. The company said it would send new trucks to the hottest parts of the country first, if possible. The company also said it would retrofit its existing package cars with cab fans, exhaust heat shields, and cargo area ventilation.
“While these improvements will make a difference in the months and years ahead, we had to fight like hell to secure them,” the Teamsters union said in its social media post Thursday. “Chris Begley should still be alive to experience them. All companies, including UPS, need to remember that their past failings to protect workers can have deadly serious consequences in the future.”
Chris Bagley should still be alive and it’s a damn shame the Teamsters failed to protect him from social murder. Only new trucks? Only next year? They drove trucks without fans, heat shields, and ventilation? What the fuck.
The Teamsters could have, at the very least, demand a total halt on driving trucks without fucking fans. “Oh but that’ll cause package delays!” Well I guess we just have to murder drivers for the sake of logistics.
If anyone tells me how great and historic the new contract is one more fucking time I’ll fucking lose it.
You must log in or register to comment.
Sorry, you are only attacking the teamsters here?
Not a single word against the fucking company that would have done nothing and would have changed nothing in the future if not for the teamsters pushing for change?
I called it social murder. If there was any justice UPS would be nationalized and its management put in prisons.
Yeah, literally, what did Teamsters do wrong, here?
So UPS will only put ac in new trucks, sometime next year, and possibly get them to the hottest parts of the country, and old trucks will get “cabin fans” (?).
I know negotiations must be really difficult. I know everyone is relying on their jobs and paychecks to survive. But it seems like too often these corporations get away with half measures and vague promises because even when we revoke our labor, they’re still the ones in control. Workers from a company like UPS seem like they should have more control than most though. Shutting down deliveries across the US indefinitely is a pretty big threat. So maybe they could have gotten better results.
The responsibility ultimately lies with UPS, though
The union has a responsibility to protect workers from UPS.
No, they have a responsibility to fight for protections for workers. They can’t implement it, UPS has too. Put your emphasis on UPS.
A responsibility they failed because they gave up the fight instead of striking.
Again, it’s UPS fault ultimately. It’s absurd to blame the union for not forcing UPS to do something over UPS not doing it in the first place.
This comment acknowledges that UPS is doing the oppression, yet still somehow blames someone else
Amazing
The Teamsters share the blame for selling out instead of striking for safe working conditions. Deal with it.
I may agree that they share the blame, but their share is significantly smaller.
If nothing else, ups should have done this is avoid workman’s comp claims.
I was shocked to find out they didn’t have AC
Iirc older trucks didnt, the upcoming trucks they have coming in should. I dont think the company has made a wide switchover to the new trucks yet.
I believe the transition starts next year. It was a very recent initiative. Old trucks are supposed to at leat get fans.
I don’t know the life span of an ups truck.
A fan can actually make things worse. When it becomes super heated, the fan can increase the heat.
Its worse if you cant sweat due to saturation of the air. The main benefit of the fan is to blow off sweat off the body so it can generate new sweat beads
Remember to refuse unsafe work. I know it’s Texas where the state doesn’t give a rat’s ass about labour protections, but the union is there to protect you from reprimands when you report that your workplace is unsafe.
The demand that EVERY truck nationwide, from Wisconsin to Florida to California needs to be fitted with A/C before work resumes is not a practical demand for the union to make since it’s needed way more in some places than others. Stop putting the blame of what UPS needed to do to prevent worker heat exhaustion deaths on the union. As a worker, if it’s above 37C/97F you’ve gotta put your tools down a few times a day, drink water and cool down, and call up your union rep or labour board if you don’t have a good place to be able to work safely.
Don’t act like the union had to make this compromise. They chose to because they didn’t want to strike and hurt the company, because class collaborationist unions always seek to reach a happy middle ground.
UPS should have been dragged over the coals, not compromised with.
86.3% voted in approval to ratify this contract, so I don’t see how this was a compromise, really.
Votes don’t happen in a vacuum. The rank-and-file were heavily encouraged to ratify and told this was as good a deal as they could get, all radical elements have been purged so there wasn’t exactly an organized “vote no” campaign to push for more radical demands, and the new contract is legitimately better than the old one.
This is a sad example of American workers being too beat down to imagine justice.
That’s kind of why I feel like I need to highlight this tragedy. American workers need to be made to see how bad things actually are so they stop settling for sellout contracts.
Curiously when Trump appointed Gorsuch, a case came up in which a truck driver chose to abandon his truck and not freeze to death and was fired for it. Gorsuch ruled in favor of the company.
An innocent man died and all I see here is petty company vs. teamsters BS
Why aren’t we talking about the fact a dude died in the heat trying to put food on his table? How about that?
That’s the underlying cause, but UPS uses the threat of poverty to force him to work himself to death. That can’t be overlooked.
What can we the people do? Can’t we make it custom to leave cold water bottles for UPS drivers on our porches? Those squeezable ice packs? Wet towels, perhaps?
- PrettyBlackDress ( @PrettyBlackDress@lemdit.com ) English4•1 year ago
post office wants that mail delivered man. No matter what. I once had to deliver the mail in a hellish thunder storm while everything was flooding. I called the carrier helping me and I asked " do they expect us to deliver the mail in this?" And he was like yea.
As far as the heat here’s my fucking solution
Make it mandatory for the offices to supply the trucks with fucking AC
They are so dam cheap and keep repairing the old trucks with no air conditioning
Does UPS deliver for the post office? I thought UPS and USPS were separate entities?
A lot of the pay and benefit increases come with an expectation that the worker will increase their productivity. US workers have been conditioned to blame themselves if they don’t meet these expectations and it has become baked into the work culture. We can not maintain the current imbalance in pay disparity and 1% wealth without structural changes but it’s culturally forbidden to even talk about this without being accused of being a communist. This paradigm has been created after decades of messaging from the system that supports the existing oligarchy - IMO.
Why don’t vehicles have some sort of heat shielding on the roof? even a car becomes like an oven if it sits out in the sun for an hour. Any vehicle should at minimum have a good heat protection at the roof so that the vehicle roof doesn’t transfer heat below and heat up the interiors.
The UPS vehicles are open. The roof itself shields the driver from a lot of harmful radiation, but if they deliver in 100°F+ weather, basically everything around them will radiate heat: the cars, the asphalt, the concrete. A heat shield on the roof would be pointless.