Driving a UPS truck in the peak of Texas heat, where it’s often 100 degrees or hotter, feels like sitting in a sauna, Deanna Gentry says.
“Even though your door’s open and you have a fan—when the sun is directly on you—it’s very, very hot, and you can’t escape it,” said Gentry, who has worked for
Gentry has closely watched the company fail to quickly deliver on a key promise to equip its vehicles with air conditioning, part of a collective bargaining agreement signed two years ago that included heat protection provisions.
“When they were able to put in the cameras it was almost overnight we all had cameras in our cars,” she said. “I feel like heat safety is more important to me than the cameras.”
After winning a historic agreement with UPS that required the delivery of at least 28,000 air-conditioned vehicles, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, along with other unions, are left fighting a two-front war of seeking contractual protections and a federal standard that provides heat protections for workers.
UPS has delivered only 10% of its promises so far, according to the Teamsters. “They are behind, very far behind—the heat is impacting our members and they need to speed up this process,” said Kara Deniz, the union’s assistant director of strategic initiatives.
Unions have made some progress on getting protections against roiling summer heat, but the practice is far from widespread: 12 union contracts out of more than 2,500 collected by Bloomberg Law since August 2023, when the Teamsters finalized their contract with UPS, contain language around heat-related injury protections for workers. From 2021 to 2023 only three contracts even mentioned heat stress and none called for specific protections to prevent the hazard, according to Bloomberg Law’s library of collective bargaining agreements.
UPS says it remains committed to the 2023 agreement, which requires the company to replace at least 28,000 vans by 2028. It prioritizes workers located in southern states like Texas, but gives UPS the option to allocate the new vehicles elsewhere.
“We’re installing air conditioning in all new delivery vehicles we buy, and we have fulfilled our commitment to outfit delivery vehicles with two fans, heat shields on the floor to lower the temperature and vents to bring in fresh air,” a UPS representative said in a statement to Bloomberg Law.
While a union contract provides an avenue for workers to arbitrate their grievances with a company failing to fulfill key promises, unions ideally still need a federal heat-illness standard to build on, legal observers say.
Heat is becoming a central issue for union organizing campaigns, but industries with high heat risks, such as agriculture and warehousing, face hurdles to win contracts with heat protections, Mimi Whittaker of the National Employment Law Project said.
Farmworkers are generally excluded from federal workplace protections, while some warehouse employers have sidestepped the issue by classifying workers as independent contractors, Whittaker noted.
“But as the Teamster’s request for information shows, it can take time for employers to implement heat protections, which can be difficult when the contract protections have to be renegotiated before both sides can see how well they’ve actually worked,” said Whittaker.
Union Contracts to Public Policy
The push by the Teamsters to enforce heat protections could be a catalyst and model for public policy on heat safety laws, according to Javier Ramirez of Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations.
“When major employers and unions agree on enforceable standards, it demonstrates feasibility and puts pressure on regulators to act,” said Ramirez. “These agreements also provide concrete examples of language and implementation strategies that lawmakers and agencies can draw from.”
The Trump Administration held public hearings in June on a Biden-era heat proposal—showing a willingness to create a heat regulation, instead of an appetite for significant delays or complete abandonment that legal observers predicted.
The proposed rule would set an initial trigger at a heat index of 80 degrees Fahrenheit and a high heat trigger of 90 degrees Fahrenheit for when employers must implement measures to protect their workers. Businesses have complained that the rule is unnecessarily broad and imposes excessively burdensome requirements like worker acclimatization periods.
Industries that are likely to be affected, such as construction and warehousing, are pressuring OSHA to modify the proposed heat rule to a more performance-oriented approach, allowing them flexibility to combat heat-related illnesses as they see fit for their workplaces.
Limitations on Federal Enforcement
Without a specific heat stress rule, OSHA has used its general duty clause to cite employers for failing to protect workers from hot conditions. The law requires employers to provide workplaces free of known, dangerous hazards that can be feasibly mitigated.
But absent a federal heat rule, unionized workers still have a process to arbitrate their grievances in federal court, noted Michael Duff, a professor of law at St. Louis University School of Law.
“There are options that you have that may actually be more efficient than what you could do with a big OSHA rule, which takes 10 years to establish, gets watered down—so to speak—and takes forever to get out the door, and then you have a change in the administration along the way,” said Duff.
OSHA in 2022 began targeting heat injuries in its inspections. The agency conducted about 7,000 heat-related inspections and issued 60 heat citations for violations of the general duty clause between April 2022 and December 2024.
Employers often challenge those citations with success, sometimes claiming OSHA can’t regulate the hazard or is taking an overly broad approach.
For example, the US Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission in 2013 vacated heat stress citations issued by OSHA against the Postal Service, citing that the agency didn’t sufficiently identify specific measures the Postal Service could have taken to reduce heat hazards.
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