Strict Rules All UPS Truck Drivers Have To Follow

If you haven't noticed, facial hair is in. As the 2010s have turned into the 2020s, it's clear that men with beards are here to stay, as they now appear everywhere from corporate boardrooms to your favorite hipster coffee shop. As the clean-shaven norms of the past have been done away with, most companies have relaxed their draconian rules regarding beards ... which is a good thing, fashion trends aside, because as Vox points out, workplace bans on facial hair carry a disturbingly racist undercurrent.

Guess which company that hasn't moved on from their rose-colored vision of the past? Yep, UPS. 

To this day, the package delivery company enforces a strict moratorium on male drivers possessing beards and/or long hair. According to a spokesperson who spoke to the BBC, "UPS prefers that its drivers, as ambassadors of the company, are clean shaven." Now, on a small scale, this results in situations wherein super-qualified applicants can get rejected for not shaving. On a bigger scale, UPS's beard ban amounts to religious discrimination, as Business Insider reports, since employees who wear beards for religious reasons are pressured to conform to the Ward Cleaver standard. In 2018, UPS had to cough up $4.9 million over these religious discrimination charges, which you'd think would be enough motivation to finally update this policy, but absurdly enough, UPS is still crabby about facial hair, much like that corny old boss you suffered through during your first high school job.

Driving for UPS isn't a simple, easy job. If anything, even the most passionate UPS driver in the world would tell you it's a crazily complex career that requires you to learn the full "340 methods," as Fortune explains. That also means, naturally, that UPS driving isn't a job where you just fill out an application, smile big at the manager, watch silly PowerPoint presentations, and receive the keys. Nah, you basically have to go through UPS bootcamp, as Business Insider points out, or as the big dogs call it, Integrad. Once you've finished some online coursework, you're sent to one of UPS's training facilities, and depending on what position you're gunning for, these hardcore classes last for anywhere from five to nine days. 

What do they teach? Hazard avoidance and management, of course. New workers are trained to be the safest drivers on the road. Efficiency rules are etched into everyone's brains. Trainees learn how to load trucks the fastest way possible, and most amusingly, have to run through a "slip-and-fall" course where they learn how to move quickly across ice without falling on their face. If you're imagining that this particularly course is hilarious to watch ... well, it's probably even funnier than you're thinking, since UPS sometimes brings in live penguins, to demonstrate some seriously skilled ice-walking. 

Anyhow, the point is, every UPS driver you've met has been through some mad serious training at Integrad, so they definitely know their stuff.

Okay, so if someone were to first tell you that UPS drivers have to follow strict rules as far as how they climb in and out of their vehicles, you'd probably think it was insane. Unlike some of UPS's other "methods," though, their requirement for drivers to follow the "three points of contact" routine, as noted by the Chicago Tribune, is actually a good safety measure.

What this means in practice, as Fortune outlines, is that when a driver gets in or out of their truck, they should have one hand on the handrail, one foot on the step, and another foot on the ground below — three points, see? — every single time, without fail. Doing this consistently reduces stress on the ankles. Keep in mind, UPS drivers have to do this hundreds upon hundreds of times a day, and using improper posture could do a surprising amount of damage: what might sound like perfectionism gone awry is, in actuality, practical advice. In general, using the three points of contact is the safest way to enter or exit trucks, as AF Group reports, and the multiple anchor points inherent to this method lowers the impact of injuries caused by slips and falls. Consider: if you have one foot on icy ground, and it slips, your hands on the handrail will catch you, as will your foot on the non-slippery step.

When you think of UPS, the first image that pops to mind is probably a big brown truck. However, if you work for UPS, you better not call it a truck. For those on the inside, as Fortune explains, these boxy vehicles are strictly referred to as "package cars."

Now, to be fair, it's highly unlikely that if and/or when a driver accidentally calls his vehicle a "truck," particularly to a non-UPS person, that they'll come back to find themselves fired, punished, or dropped through a trapdoor and electrocuted. However, UPS takes their package cars quite seriously, and they are also quite serious about calling them package cars, as seen in their promotional materials highlighting the evolution of the vehicle over the past century. Of all the vehicles highlighted, only their dreamy future one gets the honor of being called a "truck," and that'll probably change when the future becomes the present.

On that note? If you've ever imagined that one day you might own a package car of your very own, forget it. As explained by Jalopnik, UPS takes intensive care to make sure that nobody gets a retired vehicle, as most of them are turned into scrap metal once the company has finished using them.

When UPS boasts about their 340 methods, it applies to a lot of details that you might think are mundane. Every single one of these methods has been studied for decades, tested, and proven to shave seconds off of every delivery, to ensure that the company can squeeze out as many deliveries as humanly possible. One of these methods, indeed, is all about where the driver keeps their pen.

This tiny detail, according to NPR, is simple enough: If you're a driver, you must keep your pen in your pocket. Which one? Depends on hand dominance, of course. Left-handed drivers must keep their pen in their right pocket, and right-handed ones need to use the left pocket. That's front pockets only, by the way, according to Dan Honig. While taken on its own, this rule would seem ridiculously fussy, the fact that it functions alongside hundreds of similar such policies points toward the ethic of UPS, as a whole, which is a company that prizes efficiency above all else ... while not being so worried about remembering that their workers are human beings.

Most of the stricter UPS rules come straight from UPS. At least one rule, though, comes from higher up on the food chain — and it's actually a good rule, which UPS has previously tried to flout.

Who could be more powerful than UPS, you ask? The United States Department of Transportation, who strictly forbids commercial drivers from working more than 60-hour weeks, for safety reasons that should be blatantly obvious. Now, this 60-hour max does result in some hiccups, as the Denver Post writes, such as package delays, since a driver has to come back to the hub if he hits the big 60, undelivered parcels be damned. Better late than dead, though, right? However, in late 2017, KATU News reported that UPS was responding to the surge in holiday package deliveries by pushing drivers to work 70-hour weeks, which is ... well, insane.

Thankfully, the UPS delivery driver unions took legal action against the company. According to Labor Notes, unions in New England rallied in the parking lot, as hundreds of drivers refused to start their trucks, demanding that if the company didn't value their lives, they weren't going to value their requirements. When managers protested, the workers stood their ground. The solidarity of the New England drivers won against UPS, and these drivers got to keep the 60 hour weeks they wanted, instead of kowtowing to the forced overtime that had previously been demanded from them.