ENGLISH 165N PODCAST MAX VERNICK

Brian Vernick, an employee at UPS, talks about his background and how he ended up working at UPS. He had previously worked in the finance industry but lost his job during the financial crisis. He then became a stay-at-home dad for nine years before deciding to go back to work. He joined UPS as a seasonal hire and eventually became a full-time employee. He discusses the challenges of working in the summer heat and the importance of staying hydrated. He also mentions the risks associated with the job, including a tragic incident where a young driver lost his life due to extreme temperatures in the truck. So tell us a little bit about yourself first, they're going to want to know who you are. My name is Brian Vernick, and I am currently employed by United Parcel Service, also known as UPS. I live in Southampton, PA. I'm formerly from Lower Marion, Pennsylvania, where I grew up on the other side of the city. And I am the proud father of four children, three sons and a daughter, Max, Samuel, Zoe, and Michael. And it's a pleasure to speak with you this morning. That's good, that's good. So, your last job before UPS, what were you doing before that? So, I spent 20 years in the equipment, finance, and mortgage business. And that career basically ended with the financial crisis of 2008-2009, when I received a call from a close friend who was at Lehman Brothers, who informed me that he had to pack up all of his things in the office, and they were showing them all out of the building because Lehman Brothers had collapsed. At the time, I was in a mortgage brokerage in Horsham called Mortgage Options Financial. And at that time, three of you were born, three of my children. And I sat down with your mother and said, look, I'll come home, I'll stay at home with the kids, and she agreed. So, for the next nine years, I was a stay-at-home dad with you and raised the four of you, as you know. And those are some of the best memories that I have in life. Wonderful, beautiful time. And then in 2017, after about eight or nine years of that, your mother came home one day and said, hey, we need more money. It's time for you to go back to work. Your brother Michael was completing kindergarten half day, and he was going to first grade full day. So, it was time for me to go back. She said, look, UPS is hiring in Willow Grove. Put an application in there. I said, okay. Seasonal hire. Went in. The following day, they hired me. November 12, 2017. And you've been ever since? No. I have actually. So, I worked that peak season. What UPS does, they're very smart. They bring people in beginning of November, right around Black Friday, and they work them less than 30 days so that they do not qualify to make union. So, at that time, they're non-union employees, which is what I was. And then on Christmas Day, once the rush is over and everybody has their gifts, they send you packing. They lay you off. If you've done a good job, they will enter you in their system as a recommend for rehire, which is what you want after that probationary trial period, peak season hire. So, for that period, what my job was, I was working in what's called the South unload, South B unload, and my job was to unload full 53-foot and 48-foot trailers of appliances, all different kinds of furniture, Amazon packages. So, at 47 years old, basically, I went back to hard manual labor. People thought I was crazy, but I saw the opportunity. Yeah, I remember thinking, you know, Dad's going to kill himself. I knew you would be able to do it because you've always been able to put whatever your mind was able to. You've always been that type of guy. A determined guy. Even a determined guy, but I wasn't always a little worried for you. So, it gets very difficult in the summer because the trailers, obviously, are metal, and it's basically a sardine can heat incubator in the summer. So, temperatures can climb to 110, 120 degrees inside those trailers. Yeah. Just to backtrack a little bit, I was laid off, and then I came home. Your mother, obviously, was not thrilled by the news. I thought, perhaps, they would keep me, but they didn't. And I spent the next three months just hammering them twice a week. Hey, I want to come back to work. When can I come back to work? Determination. They were tired of hearing from me. Twice a week, I would call. I did not work for that three months. I said, look, give me a chance. I'm going to try to wiggle back in there. Pounded the phone, pounded the phone. HR, two times, three times a week. Finally, March 10th, I got a call. Okay, we're bringing people back on. Come back in and interview. When I came back in, I said, right at the front, I want to drive for the company. I don't want to work in the warehouse. So, they came back in. It was on my application. Today, actually, is the six-year anniversary of me being rehired. March 12th, 2018. They brought me back. Really? As a full-time employee. So, today, during this interview, I just received an email with a big UPS playing congratulations on your six years of service. So, it's a story of determination and one that I'm proud of. Well, of course, and I'm proud of you, too, for sticking with it. Tell me, did they give you anything for those six years? No. No? Just a pat on the back and go to work. Yeah, that's what I thought. No, the real gifts and presents come at the 10-year mark. I'll get another week of vacation. Right now, I have two. Two weeks paid and then two additional weeks I can take as I choose. A day here, a day there. So, four total weeks. But then, at your 10-year mark, you get a third week of paid vacation. Is that as you choose or all together? You can take them as you want. Most people take them together. And as you know, I'm taking mine now in January after peak season because I'm wiped out. So, I take my two weeks right at the beginning of January, kind of leading up to my birthday and your sister's birthday. I see. I see. You talked about how you came to the job, how you got to it, what was appealing about it, how you managed to stick with it. But now I want to talk about some of the challenges that are associated with it. You mentioned before how hot it gets in the truck. Yes, and that's a real controversial issue that got loud as the negotiations were going on for the strike. Yeah, I remember seeing a video of a—I don't believe it was a UPS driver. It was maybe an Amazon driver, something along those lines. But it was a video of a man. He was going up to deliver a package. And then once he got up to the front door, he just collapsed. That was one of our guys. That was UPS. Yes, and that was in the Phoenix, Arizona area. Yeah, I can't imagine doing it up here in the summer. It's hard. I can't imagine doing it in Phoenix, Arizona. It must be literally unbearable. I can't imagine it. So they, last summer, set a record. They had more consecutive days over 120 degrees out there with everything that's going on with global warming. From what I understand, Southern California, Arizona, Florida, the temperatures in those trucks can reach 140, 150 degrees with no air in the back. And that was a flashpoint of our negotiation. For me personally, I have had a couple of days where I was not feeling great in the summertime. There's one day in particular I was working in Bristol where I made the mistake of eating, as I was going along my route, too many blue corn tortilla chips that were full of salt. And about 3.30 in the afternoon, 4 o'clock in the afternoon, I started to become disoriented in the truck and found myself kind of driving around in circles a little bit, going from the place I just was to the next stop I thought I was going to and then backtracking. And I remember feeling dizzy and started chugging water. I was behind on my water. And that's the one thing in the summertime that you absolutely, positively cannot do. You must hydrate all day long. And they do tell you this. Let's not be uncharitable. They do, I assume, tell you in the summertime, hey, you need to drink as much water as you can. They give you Gatorade or something along those lines. Yeah, they rolled out a program called Cool Solutions probably about six or eight years ago, which is an educational program for us. They encourage us to eat fruit that has high water content, to drink Gatorade. The best thing that you can do as a driver is drink a mix, excuse me, of Gatorade and water. You don't just want to be pounding Gatorade all day because that's going to actually lead to some kidney stuff. And we've had guys, because it's very high in glucose and there's a lot of sugar in there. You want to have a mixture. Yeah, so it's like a shock to your kidneys and it could really mess you up. Yes, it can. If you're not eating and you're chugging Gatorade all day, you're going to have an issue at the end of the day. It has to be one Gatorade per three to four waters is the mix. So you want those electrolytes, but it has to be water. Water, water, water all day. On the heat issue, we had one of the major huge things that occurred is about three years ago, we had a 24-year-old driver in Southern California lose his life in the back of a package car. I did hear about that when that happened. I don't remember us talking about it, strangely enough. I think I only really came to understand how, I don't know, I guess a lot of the risks associated with your job like recently. Obviously when you were taking it, I knew it would be hard for you, but I thought it would be hard for you because it would involve a lot of labor, but I guess I didn't really understand what that labor would entail. Yeah, so obviously as we discussed, Southern California heat is even more intense than what we deal with here in Philadelphia in the summer. And he was a kid who probably did not truly understand the risks, did not hydrate properly that day, and unfortunately they found him. They see everything we do. We were on the GPS tracking system, and they saw that his truck had stopped and was not moving. So they sent a crew out to figure out what was going on, supervisor crew, and they found him in the back where it was 140, 150 degrees in there. Tragic thing that occurred, young person, anytime a young person loses their life, it's devastating. And it was really bad optics for them because that happened after the last contract was put in place. We can get into the contract, the last one, and then this one that just was ratified. But very, very bad optics. It was all over. There's a woman in the Midwest whose husband had kidney issues on the route and almost lost his life. She put a petition out to get air conditioning, and the truck's got a couple million signatures on it leading up to this contract. So they were big advocates for that. When you say they, who do you mean? This woman and the people kind of surrounding that center rallied on this petition, and they got a couple million online signatures to have air conditioning in the truck. So I don't know the woman's name. I know that he was Midwest somewhere, and he had a real issue one day where he had to be hospitalized for dehydration. What happens with dehydration is you reach a certain point. You can't put enough. If you get to that danger zone, you cannot put enough liquids back in your body without IV, and you're basically going down. It's inevitable, essentially, without an IV. Yeah. When you reach that point, you're going to die if you get in that hot zone, that danger zone. Yeah. And then they hashed something out, and that was it, essentially? Well, then it had to be ratified by our union. Yeah. Did you look over a lot of the deal when you were ratifying it? Did you go through it? It was like, okay, I like this. This could be better, stuff like that. Or were you just like, okay, whatever? Actually, so I'm a detail-oriented guy, as you know, and I'm a thorough person, and I actually read every word of the contract and was actually on a lot of calls leading up to the contract being ratified. We had a lot of Zoom calls with thousands of members of the union. I was on all those calls, so I was very informed with today's technology about what was going on, much more so than five years ago. Well, it's good to know the union has picked that up. They have. They still have some work to do with technology, but they were able to get the word out and the message out. Did I like everything that was in the new deal? No. I knew that they were screwing this over on air conditioning. They sidestepped it as only they can do, and they kicked the can down the road with it, to where I knew, okay, for at least the next five summers, I'm going to have to deal with the heat still. I'm not rushing around in the summer so that I can rush myself into a heat stroke. I'm not doing that. So you will intentionally not move as fast as you could because you know it's just not safe. It's not safe. Correct. I have a family to think about. You guys are relying on me to go to work every day to provide for you until you get out of the house and you're on your own and you have your own family. So I have to keep myself working for at least the next nine years until your brother Michael gets out of college. Yeah. But it's not as awful as everyone makes it out to be. You have to be careful. It's not an ideal working condition. The best time to do what I do is in the spring right now, after daylight savings time, and in the fall. Winters are rough. Summers are even rougher to do what I do, to work outside. But I love being outside. I'm sure. I'm sure, yeah. Are you afforded a lot of time to think about maybe what your next project is going to be like, what your next hobby is going to be like, a lot of free time to think? Or do you spend that time maybe looking at new houses, new architecture you see around that time, talking to people, stuff like that? Or is there not really much aesthetic benefit to your job? Well, I have a lot of what I call windshield time, where I have time alone with my thoughts in the truck, and I'm able to sort through a lot of different things. The job has made me fiercely organized because every moment is accounted for. Yeah. And that's been a huge benefit to me. I love this job because I love driving, and I love talking to people. As you know, I'm a very social person. So for me, those are the real benefits. I get to ride around in my truck listening to music, and I get to talk to people. I love the job still to this day, six years on. Even after everything that it's put you through and you've gone through, you still really do enjoy it. I love waking up every day and going to this job. Yes, I do. Something about it clicks for me and works for me, and I wouldn't trade it. I think I got the greatest job going. It's a good place to end on. Thank you so much for sitting down with me, Dad. It's been a real pleasure, honestly. I've learned a lot about your job and how, I guess, the modern job economy is and unions and stuff. I just wanted to add, I'm really proud. You've been a wife almost three years, and I was in there last night, saw you, and I always enjoy that time where we can spend a few minutes while you're working. As a father, it just fills me with pride to see you there, to see you earning. I feel it's one of the most important lessons that I can teach you as a dad, and you've certainly picked up. Three years of steady employment, super proud of that. Keep up the good work. Keep up the good work.