UPS faces backlash from extreme heat incidents: ‘I got flowers and that was it’

Neysa Lambeth was in Florida caring for her ailing father on 23 August 2023 when she received a call from her husband, Chris Begley, who had worked as a UPS driver for 28 years in Texas.

Begley, 57, had collapsed from the heat while delivering packages. Lambeth said a manager picked him up and took him home to recover. He had fallen ill a couple of times from the heat over the previous two years, Lambeth said, and she had picked him up from the UPS service center on those occasions.

“This time I wasn’t home, and so instead of taking him to the hospital or dialling 911, they took him home to an empty house and left him,” said Lambeth.

When she spoke with her husband on the phone when he arrived home, she noted he was very confused. Over the next few days, she said her husband tried to recover as he had in the past after falling ill from the heat by resting and drinking Gatorade, but he wasn’t able to keep it down. He collapsed in his home a couple of days later and couldn’t get up.

Related: US delivery workers swelter in record heat – many without AC in their vans

Lambeth called her son to pick him up and take him to the hospital. When she arrived at the hospital in Texas, Lambeth said her husband’s doctors weren’t hopeful about his prognosis, Begley’s organs were shutting down. He died on 28 August. Her father, who she had been in Florida to care for when her husband’s heat incident occurred, died a few days after her husband.

“I was telling him to fight. And he tried, but he just couldn’t do it,” said Lambeth. “UPS, they never contacted me. I contacted them to let them know he passed. I got flowers and that was it, I never heard from them.”

Lambeth said that in previous media statements, UPS denied her husband’s death was heat-related, claiming it was a heart issue, but she took offense to that characterization. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration issued a fine against UPS for $66,000 after an investigation found the company failed to provide Begley with access to medical care.

“I was horrified and disgusted to read that they would put something like that in the media without at least talking to me first,” said Lambeth. “For them to imply his collapse in a triple-digit-degree day while doing his route had nothing to do with his essential heart failure and subsequent death, it really defies common sense and it infuriates me that they didn’t see to the safety and wellbeing of their employee when he collapsed. Even if he did have a heart condition, of course I had no knowledge of, if they took him to the hospital that day, would they have been able to find it and correct it in time to save his life, I will never know because they didn’t do the right thing for him in my opinion.”

A UPS spokesperson said in response to Begley’s death: “Chris was a valued member of the UPS family who dedicated 28 years of service to our company, and we continue to extend our heartfelt condolences to the Begley family. We fully cooperated with authorities on the investigation following his death in August 2023. The claim that Chris died of heat stress is inconsistent with the autopsy report. The autopsy did not cite heat as Chris’s cause of death. His last day of work was several days before he became hospitalized and died.”

Lambeth began speaking out after recent incidents at UPS in Texas that are also alleged to have been heat-related. Heat is seldom considered in autopsy reports, leading to likely undercounts of heat-related deaths across the US.

Workers at UPS represented by the Teamsters demanded and won improvements for workers exposed to extreme heat in their union contract with UPS settled in July 2023, winning language that aimed to include air conditioning in vehicles purchased after 1 January 2024 and to include cooling devices in 28,000 UPS package delivery vehicles by the end of the contract in 2028.

But UPS workers are still facing heat-related incidents and pushing on UPS to implement the changes, with the Teamsters International alleging the company has made little progress in living up to the contract on heat protections.

On 6 August, 37-year-old Luis Grimaldo, a UPS driver for four years in Bell county, Texas, died, with co-workers alleging his death was heat-related, which UPS has denied.

A UPS spokesperson said Grimaldo’s death is still under investigation, but added: “We are saddened by the loss of our delivery driver Luis Grimaldo and extend our heartfelt condolences to his family and friends. We continue to work with authorities as they investigate the cause of death. Luis was only two hours into his work week, and at this time, we have no indication his death is related to heat stress.”

A day later on 16 August, a UPS driver in McKinney, Texas, the same site where Chris Begley worked, passed out from the heat while driving a UPS package vehicle and crashed. Teamsters Local 767 alleged the driver called in to UPS to report experiencing heat illness symptoms but asked the driver to drive himself back to the UPS site. The union has claimed no air conditioning is available in any of the more than 2,000 vehicles at the site yet and the union held a protest last week to demand them.

Teamsters Local 657, which represents 22 UPS sites in Texas, also held rallies to demand air conditioning in vehicles in the wake of the incidents.

Teamsters Local 886 in Oklahoma also held a rally on 30 August outside UPS sites to demand the company take immediate action to protect workers from heat, in solidarity with locals in Texas. “UPS Teamsters across the country, including our union siblings in Texas Teamsters Local 767, are facing unbearable and dangerous heat conditions,” said Zakk Flash Luttrell, a representative of Teamsters Local 886, in a press release. “We are united in our demand that UPS take immediate action to honor the contract and protect our members’ lives.”

A UPS spokesperson said: “We are aware of an incident involving our driver in McKinney, TX. We care deeply about his safety and wellbeing. We can confirm the driver received minor medical treatment and went home. We continue to work with authorities to investigate and defer to them for questions.”

“What it appears to me, all I could think was ‘It’s happening again.’ I literally just sat on the couch all day and cried because I couldn’t believe all this was occurring again. After having a death last summer, how could they not make changes?” said Lambeth.

She emphasized that she wants UPS to improve heat protections and safety for workers to prevent these cases from continuing to happen and to expedite rolling out air conditioning to vehicles, especially in southern states where workers experience more intense heat days.

A spokesperson for UPS said: “The health and safety of our team members is important to us, and we are committed to providing a safe working environment for our employees. We have comprehensive training and protocols to support our employees and continuously work to improve these measures. We invest more than $409m annually on safety training in the US and have added more cooling equipment to our vehicles and facilities. We provide employees with specialized cooling gear, access to ice and water, and encourage our people to take extra time to cool down anytime they need.”

Related: ‘We’re going to see workers die’: extreme heat is key issue in UPS contract talks

The spokesperson added the company had provided 96,000 water jugs to drivers, installed an additional 1,500 ice machines and 1,700 water fountains in our facilities, and nearly 14,000 additional fans. They said UPS currently had “hundreds” of vehicles on the road in the US with air conditioning. UPS has around 100,000 package delivery vehicles on the road in the US.

The spokesperson also said UPS has installed over 200,000 fans in package vehicles, installed 76,000 heat shields and equipped over 74,000 vehicles with air scoop induction technology.

“What I want Chris’s legacy to be is safety,” said Lambeth. “They are not doing the right thing for their employees. It doesn’t seem like they have a policy or procedure in place to handle these situations and that’s not fair to their employees. In my opinion, they are putting their employees’ lives in jeopardy by not having any safety protocols in place for this situation.”