When UPS delivery workers last went on strike, in 1997, the nature of their job was very different. Amazon, then merely an online bookstore, was barely two years out from its very first sale. Buying jeans, or new furniture, or really anything, still required most people to get in their car and head to the local mall. By the time the International Brotherhood of Teamsters announced on Tuesday that it had reached a tentative agreement with UPS that would avoid a strike and keep hundreds of thousands of union members on the job, those workers’ role in American life had changed fundamentally.
The new contract, which still needs to be ratified by the union’s members, came not a moment too soon. UPS handles a quantity of stuff so enormous that the company estimates its workers put their hands on roughly 6 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, and the company delivers nearly a quarter of all American packages. Internet retail and the volume of delivery services required to fill it have made America ever more dependent on the difficult, labor-intensive work of what’s known as last-mile package delivery. The country’s infrastructure and workforce are still struggling to catch up.
Even in the Amazon age, the volume of packages now delivered in the U.S. can sound completely absurd. In 2000, the United States Postal Service—the country’s biggest parcel shipper—delivered 2.4 billion packages. By 2022, that number had ballooned to 7.2 billion. UPS now handles 5.2 billion domestic packages annually, versus the 3.2 billion it handled in 2000, and Amazon’s logistics operation, which did not start delivering its own packages in earnest until 2018, has become the country’s third-largest shipper, delivering almost 5 billion (but not nearly all) of the company’s packages last year. And all of these packages are going to a customer base that has been trained by retailers to expect packages to arrive in just a few days—far faster than turnaround expectations used to be.
You might only really notice the handful of packages that come to your home each week (three to four in an average household). But every single time you get one, that same day there are more than 50 million other people in the country refreshing their tracking info and checking their doorbell-camera feeds to see if their new shoes or prescription refill has arrived too. And those packages had to be loaded onto a series of trucks, driven to an address, and then carried to a welcome mat by humans.
Spraying America with a nonstop fire hose of parcels has consequences that are tough for workers and not always visible to the rest of us. More packages require more trucks on the road, which means more semis on the country’s interstates and more oversize delivery vehicles on residential streets, worsening traffic for everyone. These vehicles put enormous stress on roads and bridges, requiring more frequent repairs. Streets built primarily for passenger cars can be too narrow or have turns too tight for even the most skilled drivers of cargo vehicles to navigate easily, and conducting so many home deliveries a year inevitably results in accidents, stuck vehicles, and injuries. These same roads tend not to have easy spots for trucks to park when it’s time to actually make a delivery, so they block streets and create more traffic. And each driver has to do it over and over again, dozens of times a day, until the country’s tens of millions of daily packages are delivered and each of hundreds of thousands of cargo vehicles is empty.
Once a package is off the truck, things aren’t necessarily much easier. Across the country, the median age of local housing stock predates the wide adoption of online shopping, which means that most homes were built before so many of us were getting stuff delivered multiple times a week while away at work. Mailboxes are mostly still the size that they’ve always been, so drivers need to chuck your stuff onto your porch or behind a bush and hope for the best. In apartment complexes, just gaining entry can be a struggle, and many older properties don’t have a mail room big enough to store everything safely. Unless you live in a luxury building, you probably don’t have a front desk with an attendant to accept packages in your stead. And when a bunch of brand-new, unsecured stuff is lying around, some of it is bound to get stolen, though assuming theft can be misguided: Package volume is so high and getting them all to the right place is such intricate work that a lot of missing packages were simply misdelivered.
And yet the size of delivery workforces at the country’s major shippers has not increased at the same rate as the boom in packages and the ever-shortening customer expectations on shipping time. Many shipping companies have hired lower-paid part-time workers to fill the gaps instead of creating new full-time jobs, and a significant portion of Amazon’s deliveries are made by gig workers who use their own vehicles and are paid by the package.
Gig worker or not, all of this work takes place every day of the year and mostly outside, so drivers are handling more parcels and doing more physical labor in a climate that’s becoming more extreme, and they’re doing it largely in cargo vehicles that lack air-conditioning. UPS drivers have died on the job from heat exposure, and in negotiations between the Teamsters and UPS, air-conditioning for delivery vehicles became a major sticking point. (The union’s new contract, if ratified, would guarantee AC in new delivery vehicles and add better ventilation to old ones.)
Still, better pay and safety improvements are only the first steps to address the larger spectrum of issues that delivery workers face in moving around so many packages so quickly. Improvements to road and bridge safety are not sexy line items on government budgets, and the trucks will keep rolling whether those improvements are made or not. It may just be impossible to fully retrofit the delivery economy that’s been foisted on Americans by tech companies into the physical reality of daily life. Shippers are going to keep trying anyway.
