When the Last Mile Turns Hot: Delivery Drivers in a Warming Climate

E-commerce has transformed the way goods move through the American economy, driving unprecedented growth in parcel deliveries and intensifying competition among major carriers and the U.S. Postal Service. Yet this push for speed and volume now unfolds amid longer, more intense heat waves, exposing the nation’s roughly 1.5 million delivery drivers to climate-driven temperature extremes that pose growing risks on their routes.

In this episode, economic sociologist and Kleinman Center faculty fellow Steve Viscelli discusses how rising heat intersects with the structure of the delivery industry. He describes the job conditions that can leave drivers vulnerable, from demanding routes to the use of monitoring technologies that encourage workers to stay on pace even when temperatures climb.

Viscelli looks at the policy landscape that shapes these conditions, explains why federal heat protections for workers have been slow to materialize, and how this reality affects a driver’s day-to-day experience. He also highlights steps some states are taking to set their own standards, especially to address hotter and more demanding delivery seasons.

Full Transcript

Andy Stone: Welcome to the Energy Policy Now podcast, from the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at the University of Pennsylvania. I’m Andy Stone. The volume of packages delivered to homes and businesses every day in the United States has grown dramatically in recent years, in step with the growth of e-commerce. That growth is expected to continue, with parcel shipment volumes forecast to increase by a third by the end of this decade. This means big opportunity for the nation’s well-known parcel delivery and e-commerce companies, and for the U.S. Postal Service, all of which are engaged in intense competition to deliver goods the last mile to consumers.

Yet the push to deliver ever more and ever more quickly comes at a time when the country’s growing number of delivery drivers face the additional challenge of more extreme heat along their routes. According to data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the number of heat waves per year has tripled in America’s major cities over the past half century, with a heat wave season that now averages 46 days longer. Yet nationally, little has been done to protect workers from high heat, which is the leading cause of weather-related deaths in the U.S.

On today’s podcast, we’re going to be looking at the toll of temperature on the nation’s delivery drivers with Steve Viscelli, an economic sociologist and faculty fellow with the Climate Center, Steve has spent two decades studying changes in America’s trucking industry, including a stint as a long haul trucker himself, to understand and relate how these changes have impacted the lives of drivers. More recently, Steve has focused his attention on delivery drivers themselves, who are simultaneously on the front lines of a delivery boom and of climate changes that could increase the health risks of their profession. Steve will look at the set of factors that threaten driver health. He’ll also look at the ongoing struggle to implement more protections at the federal level, and individual actions by states and others to fill a federal worker safety gap. Steve, welcome back to the podcast.

Steve Viscelli: Andy, it’s great to be back on with you.

Stone: So, you were last on eight years ago. This can be quite a long time.

Viscelli: Hard to believe.

Stone: Yeah. And that first conversation was an interesting one. It was on self-driving trucks. And at the time, the idea was that technology would revolutionize the trucking industry. Eight years later, how far along the path are we, actually, to that vision?

Viscelli: We’re quite a bit closer to having self-driving trucks on the road. Most of the companies that were working on it over the last decade or so have have gone out of business. But the last two big ones standing are still making progress. I don’t know if they’ll get it across the finish line themselves in the next couple of years, but the the progress has been incredible.

When I first started riding along with with these companies— because I’ve been embedded in a couple of different companies over the years studying their process. When I first started, these things were just jerking you all over the place and breaking hard and swerving. And it was a pretty scary experience. And then right after Covid hit— I would say, 2022— things started to really gain speed. And the trucks reached a point where you felt like you were riding along with any decent human driver. And it really went from a checklist of, “Oh, they can do this or that,” to, “Oh, my god. This is doing things at least as well as a human.” And you kind of just forgot that the machine was actually driving.

So now it’s a matter of validating that dealing with the unusual situations that humans handle really well, that the trucks still may have a real challenge with. But progress has been pretty incredible.

Stone: So you’ve moved on, or refocused your attention a little bit more recently on delivery drivers and some of the climate-driven challenges that they’re facing. Delivery drivers actually turn out to be one of the most at-risk groups for heat-related illnesses of all professions. So give us an overview. How pervasive of an issue is this, and why does it seem to be garnering more attention nationally as well as in your own research?

Viscelli: Yeah. Delivery drivers are one of the most vulnerable populations. Historically, we think about agriculture and about construction as the two big fields where workers tend to experience some real risks from from excessive heat in particular.

What’s happening in freight movement is all of this end delivery, this last mile delivery to residences, is increasing the amount of time and activity for workers outside of the vehicle and moving through public spaces up to the door of a residence, walking down the street. And this mirrors quite a bit what postal workers have have experienced forever. Now, of course, we think about those brave letter carriers going out in all kinds of conditions and getting the mail there.

These package delivery drivers, including those who’ve been at UPS, been at FedEx and now at some Amazon-developed services in recent years, they’re starting to have similar work environments and patterns to what those letter carriers have had. But packages have some real challenges to them, because they’re bulky, they’re big, they’re heavy. So they require a lot of getting in and out of the vehicle. So you may have several 100 stops in a day, if you are delivering for Amazon. And every one of those stops is, put the vehicle in park, hop out of the driver’s side, go into the back of the vehicle, pick up a package or two. Back and forth to the house, and then back in the vehicle. Drive a short distance and repeat. And when you’re doing that hundreds of times per day you’re obviously exerting yourself in a sustained and serious way. And the environmental conditions that you’re doing that in are critical to how hard that job is and a lot of the health and safety risks that come along with it.

Stone: So it goes beyond the classic image of the Postal Service delivery driver coming up to your mailbox on the street, opening the window, putting the stuff in the mailbox, and driving on. They’re getting in and out a lot more, is what you’re saying.

Viscelli: Yeah, it’s really changing the work. And of course, we’re seeing increased risk of high heat days and excessive heat days. And so for a lot of workers, that can just up the risk tremendously. So a postal worker, even before the the impacts of e-commerce— some of these workers would be walking, it’s not uncommon to have had them walking 15 or 20 miles in a day. That can be pretty brutal if you’re in a place like San Antonio or Albuquerque, on a day where it’s over 100 degrees.

And some of these changes are right in our faces and obvious to us, but but we may underestimate their impact. So you know, UPS and FedEx and the Postal Service, when they used to deliver packages, they were delivering them to businesses, primarily. Or much more likely to deliver to businesses. Now they’re delivering to residences more than businesses, at least by stop. And so what that means is you’re not coming in with a hand truck with 30 or 40 packages that are going into a store, right? Their stock, essentially, where you’re going to maybe have a 15-minute stop, and you may unload some stuff, do some paperwork. You’re going to be inside, maybe with some air conditioning.

Now, you’re doing one or two packages to to a house on average. And you’re going to be outside much more, making those walks back and forth to the truck far more frequently than in the business to business kind of shipping that really dominated the customer service of these delivery services, historically. Now they’re going residence to residence, and that really changes the work.

Stone: You’ve described a three-part shift in your writing and your work that’s reshaping delivery work today. One is the temperature changes that you just started to talk about. Exploding home delivery demand. And also, what’s called algorithmic monitoring. And all these intensify the pace and reduce the autonomy of these delivery drivers. Can you talk more about how these three forces interact, and why they may be leading to a more dangerous environment for the drivers?

Viscelli: Yeah. So this more complex work lends itself to the need for technological innovation a bit more. And so if you think about that UPS driver or that letter carrier, say, 15 years ago, before the big boom in e-commerce, and before we had these tracking technologies and planning technologies that are based right on your phone, right? The GPS-based directions, etc. Before that, what you had was most likely a very experienced worker who knew that route. They didn’t use a phone to get around and navigate. They had fewer stops, so the complexity of that route was less. And they knew it like the back of their hand, and so they weren’t following instructions from anyone on how to do it. They knew how to run that route, as the drivers would say.

As you get that more complex mix of residential stops, the benefits of having that route planned by a computer that says, “All right, here’s the fastest way to maybe meet the conditions of the delivery. These packages are priority, and they have to be there before 10 a.m., and the rest of them can wait. Here’s the best way to run that route.” And so what companies have done— and Amazon has really been pushing the envelope on this. So this is really a story— the other companies have been adopting technologies. In the case of UPS, trying to develop Amazon-like algorithmic management systems, where the computer is planning step by step, essentially, what the worker is doing while monitoring in real time. Saying, “Okay, you’re here. Here’s your pace of delivery. Here’s the best next step.” Or, “Maybe we need to send another driver to take 50 packages or 50 stops off of you.” And so it’s really Amazon that’s been pushing the envelope with these delivery apps. And what that means is that you can monitor and direct the worker in real time to meet this more complex need.

Now, for the experienced drivers— maybe UPS, or the letter carriers— they have this fallback position, if you will, or set of resources and capital, where they know how to do the work without the technology. They have a lot of experience and confidence about what the best way to do the job is. And they’ve made a career out of it. And that’s really important, compared to the workers who are coming into these algorithmic management systems, who are much more susceptible to the pressure that managers and the technology has.

And so what that looks like is, for an Amazon worker, you’ve got a green, yellow, and red coding. And so that app on your phone that’s telling you, “Okay, you’ve got 180 stops today, and you’re going to make them in 10 hours,” which is a typical length of work for some of these Amazon drivers. It’s going to tell you, “Okay, you’re green. You’re on pace.” Or, “You’re yellow. You need to work faster.” Or, “You’re red. You’re behind, and you really need to sort of up your game in getting these packages off.”

And as that intersects with extreme heat days, workers may be pushing themselves more and more. And these workers, again, are not as experienced. The Amazon workers are non-unionized, in comparison to the UPS and U.S. postal workers, who have fairly strong unions. And so they end up getting pushed to work faster and faster.

I was just doing interviews for one of my projects. I did several hundred interviews with postal workers, FedEx drivers, UPS drivers, and then Amazon drivers. And one of the things that came up over and over in response to this algorithmic management and the pressure to deliver faster was that Amazon drivers were being encouraged to literally jog from the vehicle to the door and back to try to make up time and get on pace. Now any UPS driver or letter carrier will tell you that that is an absolutely terrible idea. If you are—

Stone: Right. That’s the recipe for getting injured, right?

Viscelli: Yeah. If you’re going to make a career, a 20-, 30-year career out of delivery, as as most workers at the Postal Service and UPS do, and you jog every day, you’re going to encounter the wrong circumstances. You might be able to do it for a day, a week, a month. But you’re not going to be able to do it for a year without getting hurt.

Stone: Well, you know, it sounds like there’s an art to this delivery system that as you mentioned, the career employees really have gotten down. They know how to handle this. But then you’ve got these technologies, which are governing the speed or prodding the speed of employees, such as with Amazon, to work ever faster. And I guess this intersects with that ability to find some time and space to cool down, right? Particularly if you’re working in a particularly hot part of the country in the middle of the summer. And you don’t have access to those office buildings, either, where you can be inside, again, 10 minutes to cool down in the AC. I mean, talk about the way this might limit the workers’ ability to slow down, take a rest and access cooling.

Viscelli: Yeah, absolutely. The suburban environment does not have a lot of public spaces where drivers can just duck in and get five minutes out of the heat. And again, this may be a letter carrier or— and I should say, quickly, for letter carriers, too, this has changed because of the way we build now, right? So they may be out in these residential, suburban areas where they’re walking longer distances. The houses are bigger, the lots are further apart. And so there’s no place to go, and you’re walking greater distances.

Similarly, with Amazon package delivery drivers, they’re in and out of the truck. There’s no space to go. And so I was interviewing drivers who were being tracked. And the manager may say to them, “Hey, I see that you were stopped here for five minutes or 10 minutes. You know, you were stealing time from the company. You should have been delivering.”

Stone: Is this the language it’s actually used? This is a what the drivers are hearing?

Viscelli: Yeah, that’s what the drivers are hearing. And the drivers would say, “Well, if you check that location, it’s a convenience store. I was standing in the beer cooler. You know, because it’s 120 degrees out there.” And you know, when you’re in and out of the vehicle, even if it has air conditioning, it’s not going to be sufficient to keep it cool, because you’re always opening the doors. It’s out on the street, exposed to sun all day. And it’s just not going to cool you off.

Stone: Well, it’s interesting that you bring that up now. Because some information I saw in my research before we were speaking, that it says temperatures inside delivery vehicles can be 30 to 40 degrees hotter than the outdoor air. So if you’re at 95 degrees outside, you could be potentially 135 degrees inside that vehicle. And not all the vehicles have AC right? I believe that UPS trucks do not. I think the Amazon trucks do. But there seems to be, as you just kind of alluded to, some debate over whether air conditioning in the vehicles is actually a meaningful protection for the drivers.

Viscelli: That’s right. Historically, most delivery vehicles have not had air conditioning. And even when you do, the demands on it with the doors opening and— you’ve basically got a big, in the case of UPS, brown box, sitting in the sun. So it’s going to be quite a bit warmer.

So the Postal Service is now— and many listeners may have heard about this— upgrading its fleet. It will have air conditioning. It’s taken forever. These vehicles, some of them are 35 years old. They have all kinds of problems. We’re going to see some benefits there, especially for those letter carriers who are doing what they call mounted delivery, which is a throwback, I guess, to back in the origins of the Postal Service. Again, we should probably give a shout out here to our our founder, Ben Franklin, first Postmaster.

Stone: Wait, you say “mounted.” You mean mounted on horseback?

Viscelli: That’s what they call it. And it is— that is when you don’t leave the vehicle. So that’s that more rural, roll down the window and open up the mailbox and put the mail in. That’s called mounted delivery, which is great. So Ben Franklin, of course, first Postmaster General of the United States.

So the Postal Service is getting new trucks. UPS has just had a historic negotiation with the with the Teamsters. The Teamsters earned very high wage levels. They have good benefits. And one of the things that they really fought very hard for was air conditioning in the vehicle. So that’s starting to be introduced. This was driven by the death of of a UPS driver from from heat stroke. We have had several letter carriers die in the last few years from from heat stroke.

The Amazon drivers have air conditioning in the vehicle, but they’re in and out of it so much that they really— it’s not about having that cool space available to them. It’s about having the time to actually sit in that space and cool off. Which, again, the postal carriers and the teamsters have the experience of having sometimes decades of of experience in these jobs to know, and the confidence to say, “I need a break. I’m going to take a break.” Whereas some of these newer workers, who are younger and maybe don’t understand the symptoms of heat stroke, haven’t been trained in it, et cetera, and don’t have the confidence to tell their boss, “Hey, I’m taking a 15- minute break, because I can’t continue to work at this pace.” They’re going to be— and they are— much more vulnerable to this.

Stone: You already started to talk about it. You talked about going into the beer cooler. You know, from your discussions with the drivers, are there any other strategies that they’re using to to manage? We talk here about heat. I guess cold is also an issue as well, right?

Viscelli: Yeah, cold is an issue. And again, it’s some of these bigger changes, the frog in the pot, where we’re seeing these gradual but steady shifts in the kind of service that they’re providing, where weather conditions and more severe weather conditions become problematic. So I’ll just give you the example of of icy conditions, which historically have always been challenging for delivery. But again, you’ve got more residential environments. So, who’s shoveling their walk, who’s not? Whose stoop is icy? And you’ve got the addition of packages.

And I’ll give you just— I’ll give you two examples. Two of the things that people like to order, because they don’t want to carry them themselves, are cases of water and dog food. And so, now, you can imagine, in icy conditions where you’ve got both hands on a 50-pound bag of dog food that’s in a box. And it may not be the appropriate size box, so it may shift around on you as you go to put it on your shoulder or something like that.

And so we’re seeing an increase in in injuries there. When I interviewed workers at some FedEx facilities, they had a problem at FedEx, at several of these facilities, called Chewy Tuesday. And Chewy Tuesday was the day that Chewy Dog Food would bring a tractor trailer full of 50-pound bags of dog food into the FedEx terminal. And of course, who’s going to order these? It’d be the people who live on the fifth floor of a walk up, right, who are getting them. And so everybody was calling out sick on Chewy Tuesday. And so they had this major staffing problem.

But you can just see how this change in where you’re delivering and what you’re delivering is intersecting with the possibility of more icy days, more high heat days. This is really a terrible intersection for these workers.

Stone: Jumping back to the issue of heat—and you did mention a couple of minutes ago, that UPS, I think, in summer of 2024, negotiated this contract with the Teamsters union. And as part of that negotiation, the new trucks that UPS buys will have air conditioning. Obviously, those are unionized employees working with a company with which that union has a long-established relationship. But as you also mentioned, some of these companies— Amazon, I believe, to some extent or a large extent, FedEx as well— do not have their actual own employees engaged in the last-mile delivery work. These employees are actually employed by contractors that then contract to UPS, Amazon. And I want to ask you, to what extent does that structure impact or limit the ability of workers to get the protections that they need in extreme conditions?

Viscelli: Yeah. It presents a severe restriction, a limitation, on workers’ ability to get these issues addressed. So that is probably the first important thing to recognize, is that Amazon, over the last— I guess we’re at seven, eight years or so, since it’s really begun developing what it calls its “DSP system,” or delivery service partners— has built the largest parcel delivery system in the United States, behind the U.S. Postal Service.

So when Amazon began doing high volumes of home deliveries, it relied on what we used to call the Big Three. FedEx, UPS, and U.S. postal system. Over the last seven to eight years, Amazon has built a delivery system that by employment and package volume is larger than UPS and FedEx, but it doesn’t employ, really, any of those workers. A big chunk of them are employed by these delivery service partners. And so those are employees of that subcontractor, but they’re not employees of of Amazon. As a result of this, they’re in very small what would potentially be bargaining units, should they be unionized, like most of the rest of delivery before this. So there have been a few efforts to unionize those workers. But those haven’t gone very far.

The other large chunk of Amazon delivery workers are what are called Amazon Flex workers. And these are gig workers who— essentially, it’s Uber for packages. So you sign up for a block of delivery. Amazon will put together a route of say four hours worth of packages. And then you bid on it. You say, “I’ll do that for 85 bucks.”

Q: I think I’ve seen these. They’re driving their own cars up and down my suburban block, and they’re not in trucks. Is this who you’re talking about?

Viscelli: Yeah. So these are— you know, it’s, like I say, Uber for packages. They’re going to be driving their personal vehicle. They’re classified as independent contractors for wage and labor labor law. So they’re not entitled to overtime. They don’t get workers compensation, unemployment insurance, contributions to Medicare, Social Security, et cetera. So, you know, that complicates the mix on the Amazon side.

So Amazon is building these new delivery vehicles that the DSPs use for most of their routes. But when they’re not using those, those employee drivers of the subcontractor may also— you may be seeing Enterprise or U-Haul trucks showing up as well. When they run out of capacity with those vehicles that are spec’d specifically for package delivery, they may just have any rental van or truck in there. Those present all kinds of problems. Because, I mean, I don’t know if you’ve ever moved your own stuff in a U-Haul. But it’s not easy to get in and out of the back of those trucks, right? And so they’re not designed to get in and out of 180 times a day. Now, with heat, with ice, et cetera, it’s going to be problematic.

For those independent contractors, of course, they’re going to be driving their personal vehicle. And you know, oftentimes these workers who are out to get some extra cash. They could be driving any kind of vehicle, almost none of which, right, are going to really be set up well for package delivery. These are the folks you may see with like packages up on the dashboard, limiting their visibility, et cetera.

Stone: So I want to get to the policy aspects of all this. But before I do, I just want to acknowledge that there are also— you talked about gig workers. There are also many gig workers who face the same challenges we’re talking about here today. The food delivery drivers, the pizza delivery drivers, right? I mean, I would imagine they’re kind of in a similar boat.

Viscelli: Yeah, they are. You know, and they may be on a bike too, right? We’re seeing all sorts of modes of transportation, particularly in bigger cities, that present all kinds of health and safety concerns for workers who’ve got big cooler bags on their back and are balanced on a bicycle, and again, being pushed to work faster and faster.

Stone: Yeah. So it a lot going on. There’s this stat that I saw. Looking at New York City itself, the number of packages delivered per day shot up— I think this was in 2024 or so— to 2.5 million packages a day, up from 1.1 million packages in 2017. So that really talks to the increase in terms of package delivery, in terms of the volumes of it.

So let’s get back to policy here. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, is, I believe, responsible for a lot of these worker protections. And it has been working to develop a national heat safety standard. And in 2024, it released a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that would require employers to provide water, shade, and paid heat breaks once a certain temperature threshold is met. I don’t think that’s necessarily specific to delivery drivers. That maybe agriculture or construction as well. And generally, my understanding is that labor and safety groups have supported the move, while specifically the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Small Business Administration and others have raised concerns about the costs and administrative burdens that will go along with such a rule. So can you comment on the difficulty that OSHA or any federal agency has faced in trying to establish national heat protections for outdoor workers, including delivery drivers?

Viscelli: Yes. So this is the first proposed national rule, federal rule, for heat-related risks to workers. It’s long overdue. I’d say the first big challenge is that we have a lot of workers who are invisible, but less visible and more vulnerable. And so if you look at heat-related risk to workers, it is disproportionately low-wage workers, workers of color, and immigrants who are at the greatest risk historically.

And so number one has been agriculture. You know, I did a project for the state of California a couple years ago looking at the supply of agricultural truck drivers both in the fields and then moving the products out of California. And we were surveying workers, interviewing workers, in the Central Valley of California, at different locations.

The heat stress there is unbelievable. So we would be— a typical day on the pavement that drivers and workers were unloading trucks on, it could easily be 130 degrees. Just unbelievable heat, sun, et cetera. And so a lot of these workers are are immigrant workers. They’re on visas. They have limited to no ability to demand protections from this. And so they have not had a strong political voice that can influence policy.

Now, the state of California, because of those workers, has developed a set of fairly effective heat regulations. They’re looking at new ones. At the federal level, we have seen resistance from southern states and from the business community that suggests that these regulations will be burdensome. Now, OSHA’s own analysis of this indicates that, as proposed currently, the benefits of these will significantly outweigh the cost of them. But up until this point, the workers who would have benefited the most from a heat rule were in agriculture and construction.

And these are the two labor markets where we’ve seen some of the most important degradation of labor standards. So these are dispersed. You know, it’s not like you can go to one big factory and say, “What’s happening in this factory?” Construction sites are spread out all over the place. Agricultural sites are spread out all over the place. And they’re seasonal, right? So they pop up here, and workers are here for a couple weeks or a couple months, and then they move on. And so as an enforcement issue with the small companies, the vulnerable workers, and the seasonal and dispersed workplaces, these are the hardest places to figure out what’s happening and to improve conditions for workers.

Stone: So OSHA does have this Notice of Proposed Rulemaking. It seems to me that there is a fallback clause, which is the general duty clause, which is an OSHA rule that requires employers to keep workplaces free of recognized safety hazard. But I would imagine that’s maybe not enough in any of these circumstances, or in the circumstance of drivers, which is really kind of what we’ve been talking about mostly.

Viscelli: Yeah. We really don’t have a specific enough rule yet. So what has been proposed is one that has a specific set of triggers in which employers are responsible for implementing the key measures that will protect workers. Number one, hydration. Shade and rest being the other two. And so what we need is a clear set of standards that are going to say, “Under these conditions, you’re responsible for mitigating these risks with these specific actions.”

The general duty clause becomes burdensome because then you have to prove, okay, what were the conditions? Was it reasonable for the employer to take action? How could they have known? Et cetera. So we need some specific guidance for these. Now, again, some of this is well- documented and has been researched in in the existing areas where we see concerns for vulnerable workers, such as agriculture and construction. But now in package delivery, it’s new, right? And so the conditions that workers may face, again, in that historic business-to-business, fewer stops model at UPS, versus what they’re experiencing at Amazon with house-to-house delivery— we don’t necessarily know as much as we need to about the risks involved in this work or the best ways to mitigate them.

So the start is to have some basic rules about when you need to start being concerned about heat- related risk. And then, what are the basic steps that you can take? And then, we need to evaluate what’s working, what risks remain? What are the other factors that are affecting whether or not workers are at greater risk, and how can we protect them?

So some states, as you’ve noted, have actually taken steps forward on this. California, Oregon, and Washington State do have some rules regarding heat and worker safety. Colorado, I think, has a rule, but that applies specifically to agriculture. Conversely, Texas and Florida have made it impossible for municipalities to come up with their own worker protections. Those have to come from the state level.

Stone: That’s right. And this is where, of course, we have lots of vulnerable workers, both due to the conditions— the environmental conditions— and then the prevalence of outdoor work, particularly in agriculture. But again, you know, with the growth in e-commerce, increasingly in in delivery as well. And so it’s essential that we have a set of federal rules.

I would also say, this rule, proposed by the Biden Administration, appears to be continuing at good speed thus far through the Trump Administration and is unlike another 60 or so rules that that OSHA has proposed under the current administration of eliminating or significantly revising, in its attempt to to deregulate the governance of workplaces in the United States. This rule alone, in isolation, needs to be supported by a robust system of labor regulation in which workers are properly classified as employees if they should be. The company with actual control over the workers—  think Amazon here— is held responsible, not just the subcontractor. If it is the case that Amazon can pressure the subcontractor right to speed up the work, or to not provide the appropriate resources to workers to protect themselves, but also doesn’t have accountability when there are consequences.

And so a single rule on its own, if we’re weakening the enforcement of all the other labor regulations, is going to be much less effective. And so we need to have a multi-pronged approach in ensuring that workers have a voice on the job, are properly classified, have other protections that this rule, then, is able to specifically address the heat risks.

Stone: Okay. So, Steve, if you were the person designing these policies right now, if you could wave the magic wand and design a strong heat protection framework, what would that look like?

Viscelli: Well, I think that the current proposal from OSHA— and it just received a whole bunch of public comments, and then they extended the public comment period. It’s a good basic model, which is, we need to have a specific set of environmental conditions. In this case, heat triggers, 80 degrees, 90 degrees. And then we need a specific set of interventions that are taken by employers to ensure that people are getting adequate water, shade if it’s appropriate, and then rest. So that’s great, that we’re going to have that specific rule, potentially.

And then we need to ensure that workers are actually able to use it. And a lot of that has to do with some bigger issues that we, unfortunately, have not done a great job of addressing. Which are worker classification. What about those independent contractors? Are they going to be protected? And then two, the co-employment issues. So, if a bigger company like Amazon is subcontracting— and subcontracting is very important in the historic industries at risk, agriculture and construction—are the folks who actually have the power to say that things are going to happen in a workplace or not, are they actually accountable? Right? Do the subcontractors have the power to do the things that they need to do? Or do we need to hold the parent firm, or the customer, depending on how you look at it, accountable as well?

And so I think those are really the key. And it comes down to having some worker power and voice in the workplace for them to be able to ensure that the law is benefiting them, right? And that employers who are not following the rules are held to account.

Stone: So if we don’t get these changes that you’re talking about right now, I guess a very fundamental question is, is today’s last-mile delivery model really a sustainable model for worker health?

Viscelli: It’s a mixed scorecard right now. We’ve got some really good advances in vehicle technology that can make the work safer. But we are moving in the wrong direction in terms of the pace of work, the safety of work. And it’s early days in the development of this and in the research, but we’re seeing really high injury rates, which indicate that workers and worker concerns around health and safety are really taking a back seat right now as we’re rapidly moving forward, as you mentioned. Package volumes and demand are just continuing to increase without any end in sight.

So we’re moving toward a more physically intensive, more dangerous job, at a time when, of course, the number of extreme heat days is going up. And so as we are currently approaching the problem, no. We’re headed in the wrong direction, and it is time to develop some good standards and good mechanisms for enforcement of those standards.

Stone: So if we put the onus on the companies themselves, what needs to change in terms of the vehicles themselves—  you already started talking about the AC, the monitoring technology, route expectations, job design, whatever it may be— again, to make this last-mile delivery safe as the climate warms?

Viscelli: I think the number one thing that I’ve seen in my research so far is the ability of workers to actually have some say in this. And I’ll give you the best example I’ve seen, which I think is an excellent one, and that’s the U.S. Postal Service. So, you know, with all of these new technologies and the tracking and monitoring, we’re getting tons of great data. Then the question becomes, “Well, what are the priorities that are going to guide the analysis of this data?” And then, what purpose it’s put to.

And so, historically, monitoring and directing delivery has been challenging because you didn’t know what workers were doing out there in the world, right? And so you’d have some basic rules. And you would time the routes. You’d literally walk them, and say, “Okay, I think it’s reasonable that a letter carrier can can do these 150 houses, or 300 houses in eight hours. That’s going to be the route.”

And so with new technology being introduced, the first impulse that managers had at the U.S. Postal Service was, “Aha. You know, we’ve got the real data now. We can see that the carriers are slowing down here, or could speed up there.” But the data is partial, right? It basically gives you the location and time of the worker. It doesn’t tell you whether or not Miss Jones had trouble getting her mail and so the carrier helped her back up to her house, or whatever it was that they were doing.

And so the Postal Service initially tried to impose these efficiency measures and sort of speed up the process using the data without a full picture. And the carriers complained. And they said, “Look, you just don’t understand it. You know, I’m either in the beer cooler, I’m helping Mrs. Jones. You know, this is the reality that this is this data is giving you a partial view of.” And so what the Postal Service did, to its credit, is it began creating these joint management worker teams to take that data and say, “Well, what is the best way to run this route through this suburban area? How do we get the efficiency gains while also improving the job?”

And I think that that’s critical, right? Because if the priorities are driven simply by, “How do we move things faster and cheaper?” The consequences for workers, especially with heat-related illness— they’re going to be obvious, right? We’re going to have more workers getting hurt. And I just want to say, one thing we didn’t talk about is that you can— you’ve got heat stroke, right? You’ve got the the immediate impact of these things. But what we’ve seen with agricultural workers in particular is there are long-term health consequences, particularly for organs— kidneys, liver, the heart— from this heat stress. So you may not just pass out and die from dehydration and heat stroke. You get long-term organ damage from this, from too much heat stress.

And so these are big, structural, long-term issues. And if workers are not involved in that, if we’re just going to go cheaper and faster, I think it’s pretty obvious that we’re building, now—again, Amazon has built a workforce that’s near half-a-million-plus. We’re not sure how many independent contractors are doing this work regularly. That’s one of the new research questions I’m looking at. But a huge workforce, that— it looks like it’s just going to continue to grow. And so we’ve got to deal with these problems, and the companies are going to have to be partners in this with the workers who are at risk.

Stone: Steve, thanks very much for talking.

Viscelli: Always a pleasure, Andy.