On July 24, a UPS worker was struck and killed at the company’s distribution hub on Blair Mill Road in Horsham Township, Pennsylvania. Police, firefighters and emergency medical personnel were dispatched at 12:36 p.m. after reports of a worker trapped at a loading dock. The fatality occurred inside the sprawling complex during the middle of the workday.

According to HorshamNow, citing initial emergency reports, workers witnessed the employee being struck by the rear of a tractor-trailer as it moved away from a loading dock. The worker’s head was pinned between the trailer and the dock. The precise sequence of events—including why the worker was in the path of the vehicle and what procedures were in effect—has not been made public.

Witnesses told dispatchers that they could not perform CPR because the worker remained pinned. When emergency responders reached him, they found him at the loading dock with catastrophic head injuries. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

Four days later, police had still not released the worker’s name, and neither UPS nor the authorities had provided a substantive account of how the fatality occurred. No public statement from his family or friends could be located as of this writing. The silence has left his coworkers and the public without even the elementary facts about a death that took place inside one of the largest logistics corporations in the world.

An online commenter who identified himself as a worker at the Horsham hub wrote, “I work there and they made us work day shift as this happened.” Another apparent coworker replied, “I work there too. Had a feeling that would be the case. I’m really sorry.” These accounts have not been independently verified, but they are consistent with the response to previous deaths at UPS and other major workplaces. And consistent with previous deaths, the dead worker is removed and production continues.

The Horsham facility is covered by Teamsters Local 384. Teamsters Local 107, a neighboring Philadelphia-area local, issued a brief Facebook message acknowledging the death. But as of publication, Local 384 itself, the Teamsters national union and its Package Division had issued no public statement. None had demanded that work be halted pending a transparent investigation, that the findings be released to the workforce, or that workers suffer no loss of pay while the conditions that produced the fatality were examined.

The death in Horsham is the latest in a series of fatalities at UPS facilities. On May 5, 35-year-old Julio Valverde, a 16-year UPS worker, collapsed at the company’s customer center in East Hempfield Township, Pennsylvania, and died of heart disease, according to the county coroner.

A fundraiser organized for Valverde’s family described him as a beloved son, brother and friend whose warmth and “infectious smile” brightened every room. To his family, he was the head of the household, a guide and father figure, and its primary financial provider. “Whether bonding over anime and gaming, plotting surprises for mom, or watching him play with his niece,” the family wrote, “Julio was the light of their lives.”

As emergency responders attempted to resuscitate Valverde, supervisors instructed employees to keep working within feet of where he lay. More than a month later, his mother, Rose Mendez, said UPS still had not explained why his coworkers were ordered to continue working while her son was dying.

One worker told Lancaster Online, “We started running, even though we were all traumatized and didn’t want to. No one told us to evacuate the area.” The worker added, “I bawled when I got home. Then, the following day, I was told he was gone and my heart broke.”

The same pattern played out on September 21, 2025, when 43-year-old Shelma Reyna Guerrero, a UPS driver and mother of five, was killed inside a cargo trailer at a UPS facility in Richmond, California. Guerrero had been working alone when a wall of heavy packages fell on top of her. A coworker later found her body.

UPS shut the building for roughly two hours before restarting operations while Guerrero’s body remained in the open trailer. A worker told the World Socialist Web Site, “It was just business as usual. I’m so angry, upset and just freaking pissed off. The lack of respect, compassion and empathy they showed her in death just killed me.”

UPS is currently carrying out a vast restructuring. The company eliminated approximately 14,000 positions, primarily in management, and reduced its operational workforce by approximately 48,000 positions in 2025, including 15,000 fewer seasonal positions. It announced plans to eliminate approximately 30,000 additional operational positions in 2026. UPS closed daily operations at 93 buildings in 2025. During the first quarter of 2026, it closed 23 more, 22 of them permanently, and identified another 27 buildings for closure during the year.

On Tuesday, four days after the unidentified Horsham worker was killed, UPS reported its second-quarter results. The company recorded $22.8 billion in revenue and $2.1 billion in adjusted operating profit. Adjusted operating profit in its US domestic package division rose 21 percent from the same quarter a year earlier, to nearly $1.2 billion.

UPS told investors that its transformation programs had produced $1.2 billion in benefits during the first six months of the year and would generate $3 billion for 2026 as a whole. It expects to pay $5.4 billion in dividends this year. At the same time, the company recorded $891 million in after-tax transformation charges, chiefly the cost of separating workers from their jobs under its Driver Choice Program.

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that 5,070 workers died from occupational injuries in 2024—nearly 14 every day. The Trump administration’s fiscal year 2026 budget request sought to cut OSHA funding by nearly 8 percent, eliminate 223 full-time-equivalent positions—a 12.3 percent reduction—and reduce planned federal workplace inspections to 24,929. Congress ultimately enacted a much smaller funding cut, appropriating $629.3 million compared with $632.3 million in 2025.

The Teamsters bureaucracy also bears direct responsibility for maintaining the labor-management framework in which these conditions persist. In 2023, the apparatus under General President Sean O’Brien rammed through a contract it proclaimed “historic,” but which was followed soon after with mass layoffs.

Working closely with the Teamsters, UPS created its Comprehensive Health & Safety Process, which the company says now comprises more than 3,000 joint committees globally, including more than 2,400 in the United States. In these committees, according to UPS, union-represented workers “work hand in hand with management to conduct facility and equipment audits, recommend work process changes and provide safety compliance training.” These committees are the mechanism through which the Teamsters bureaucracy signs off on the safety regime imposed by management.

The silence of Local 384 and the national union after the Horsham death is a complicit one. A genuine investigation would have to examine staffing levels, training, vehicle-movement procedures, dock safeguards, work pace and the pressure to keep packages moving even during a fatal emergency. Such an investigation would immediately collide with UPS’s profit strategy and with the union bureaucracy that enforces it.

UPS workers must organize independently through rank-and-file committees, democratically controlled by workers rather than union officials and management. These committees should demand the immediate preservation and release of all evidence in the Horsham fatality; full disclosure of staffing, training and safety records; the right to halt unsafe operations without retaliation or loss of pay; and an investigation controlled by trusted representatives elected from the shop floor.

Preventing the next death requires a movement that places workers’ lives above UPS’s dividends and profit targets. The power to stop production exists in the hands of the workforce itself. It must be organized and used.