A year after a union contract won “historic heat protections” for UPS drivers, the Teamsters are still pushing the company to do more to protect workers in vehicles that can reach up to 120 degrees. Multiple employees told Mother Jones their vehicles are still hot—and dangerous.
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“Workers across industries and in virtually every geography are saying [heat] is a new danger that we are confronted with more and more days of the year,” Anastasia Christman, a policy analyst at the National Employment Law Project, said. The UPS agreement is likely the first private-sector contract to explicitly include heat protections, she said, calling it “first in class.”
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As global temperatures continue their perilous climb, it’s likely that extreme heat will increasingly become the subject of labor disputes. Christman, from the National Employment Law Project, said that climate change is challenging the preexisting framework of workplace safety. Traditionally, workers have organized around “specific safety issues”—like a dangerous piece of equipment—but extreme heat is a pervasive, external problem, unconfined to a single workplace or geographic area.
Extreme heat is likely to reshape all workplaces, and it will bring with it what Christman called an “ideological challenge” on a new scale. Soon—sooner than we may think—workplaces will not be able to continue with business as usual. “There’s going to come a point where those packages aren’t going to get delivered and those trucks aren’t going to be rolling out, because there’s not going to be any workers healthy enough to do it,” Christman said. “If workers aren’t kept safe, companies won’t be able to continue to function.”
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Read the full article at motherjones.com.
