A 57-year-old UPS driver in Texas died after collapsing in the heat while making deliveries
A 57-year-old UPS driver in Texas died after collapsing in the heat while making deliveries
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.
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?
136Seriously, this sort of absolutist shit is stupid. So what do we do? We all stop working unless our work conditions are 100% perfect? It’s like people who constantly call for a general strike to change society. Sure, if you’re rich and can afford to stop working, that’s great for you. The rest of us fight for the changes we can get.
29Yeah, literally, what did Teamsters do wrong, here?
13So 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.
10
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
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Man STFU. Its sad that Chris died and is always preventable, but in the end it does come down to taking care of yourself and knowing your own bodies limits. The union isnt going to strike to bankrupt the company until every truck gets AC, trucks not equipped with fans is not a condition that makes trucks undrivable, and dont put the blame on the union for any of this.
This is the best contract we've had in years, and historically, it is the best we've ever had. We got 60 concessions in the next contract, including improved safety features, all cars must have a fan within 30 days of ratification, 2 within 3 months, all part timers are now starting at $21, drivers are no longer being forced to work 6 days a week, we eliminated the unfair 2 tier pay system for drivers, seasonal vehicle drivers are now seasonal only and part timers get first dibs at those positions, and many other items i cant remember.
Do not slander my union
45I was a Teamster when I worked for Sygma, and out of all the unions I've been a member of (four, now), the Teamsters were the motherfucking worst. If they were actively trying to take a revolving door of 18- and 19-year-olds just getting their first big-boy jobs and turn them into all into die-hard anti-union voters for life, they couldn't do a better job than they're doing right now, and I told my steward that before I quit.
They designed the whole contract specifically to offload all the real work onto the new guys, protect the older guys when they decided to throw hands on the loading dock, and give as much overtime as possible to the ancient, divorced boomers with no family to go home to, that they could spend pretending to sweep the floors while the trainees finished the actual loading. Guys would bid order picking, then use seniority to bump bid loads/receivers off their jobs and wouldn't pick a single case for the whole contract, while getting paid picker bonuses and shift differentials.
And just to rub salt into the wound, those perks (bumping lower guys off their bid jobs and "sweeping the floor" during overtime) were specifically written out of the latest contract, so only the guys hired under the previous contract would ever get to do them. They straight robbed those kids of even anything to look forward to if they toughed out the low-seniority years. They also negotiated a different pay scale for under 5 years, 5-10 years, and 10 years in, and you can guess which end of that they weighted the raises toward. It was a complete shitshow, and when kids would quit, the Teamsters would keep their initiation fee (taken out of the first three paychecks). You could call to try to get it back, but the best they'd do would be to put it towards your initiation fee for your next Teamster job, as if any of those kids would ever willingly subject themselves to that shit ever again.
AND THERE'S MORE. I just don't feel like typing up a fucking novel on it. Don't even get me started on the shady shit they did during the contract negotiations I was actually present for. It was worse than maddening; it felt like it was specifically crafted by the senior guys to make sure that ladder was pulled up as high as they could behind them, while not actually making any waves for the company. And the safety issues they ignored and covered up, and the fancy fucking "union meetings" they never told anyone about so that they were only attended by the office reps, because they were being held at the most expensive restaurants in the city, on the union's dime, and the number of stewards who were literally fucking floor supervisors, and on, and on, and on....
UIW was kind of spineless and milquetoast, but they took care of us. The Teamsters are fucking old-school mob racket motherfuckers who are single-handedly responsible for an entire generation of workers who think all unions are a scam.
16Drivers are regularly being hospitalized and murdered because the trucks are unsafe. Your union failed to put the health and safety of workers ahead of the company - like you said, the union isn't going to bankrupt the company because they're on the company's side. Not the workers.
-15Some of the things he typed were regarding health and safety. I fail to see how they didn't consider health and safety.
And he's right that it's offputting how heavily you had put your shame on the people who got a lot for the employees, and virtually none of it on the company that fought to stop it.
9Health and safety starts by being able to show up to work and make money to live on, thats the US system. Its not the best system, but its what we have to work with and the union is making it better and better for us every contract. Talk to Fedex express employees, theyre going away. Talk to FE Ground or Amazon, DHL, whatever else is out there. They dont have it nearly as good as we got it at Big Brown.
4
28Don't worry everyone.
His body was moved aside and another person replaced him immediately to ensure their is no disruption to your service. Like cogs in a machine.
22I'm very glad to hear this news. I was worried that my Chewy package would be a day late
6
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.
14Curiously 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.
1Don'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.
-486.3% voted in approval to ratify this contract, so I don't see how this was a compromise, really.
4
I get your anger, and I'd just argue that the best place to put that anger is solidarity. Anything less and they're winning.
The institutions we use to fight for workers will always suck at least a little bit. Even people who mean well still suck at least a little bit. But we gotta fight with the tools we have, not the ones we want.
I don't mean "shut up and take it," I mean show up tomorrow ready to keep fighting.
12Keep fighting? The contract won't be up for negotiation again for a long fucking time. This was a chance to fight and they blew it.
Solidarity to the drivers. The rank-and-file needs to retake the union from class collaborationist sellouts, the fight isn't just against UPS but against its agents within the union.
-4
As a consumer I would feel sick knowing that people died due to hazardous conditions in shipping me stuff. Nothing I can ever buy is worth someone's life.
11Yes, but, what about those poor little multibillion dollar corporations who need their spam mail delivered RIGHT NOW? All these workers trying to, "not die," is getting in the way of their profits!! :(
4
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?
11That's the underlying cause, but UPS uses the threat of poverty to force him to work himself to death. That can't be overlooked.
7What 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?
1
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.
6Okay sure, but the headline doesn't say if profitability was impacted?
Fucking capitalism takes another one, man...
6Why 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.
4The 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.
5
and only 8 years til retirement!
2post 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
-24UPS is not the post office. USPS is the post office.
9Does UPS deliver for the post office? I thought UPS and USPS were separate entities?
2