Extreme heat puts American workers at risk
Extreme heat does not impact everyone equally, and that is evident in the lives of those who “grow our food, deliver our packages, and build our homes,” Jeremy Ney and Zoe Siegel report for American Inequality.
Further, Ney and Siegel report that those who occupy these jobs are ” disproportionately Latino and immigrant, and a significant share are undocumented or working on temporary visas.”
In particular, they explain how heat risk lands heavily on migrant and immigrant farmworkers: “Workers who fear retaliation, job loss, or immigration enforcement are far less likely to report a missed water break or push back on an unsafe pace, even when they recognize the early signs of heat illness in themselves or a coworker. Piece-rate pay (where more work means more money), common in agriculture, adds its own pressure: workers are paid by the bucket or the row, not the hour, which quietly punishes anyone who stops to rest or drink water.
And because research shows that extreme temperatures are bad for human health, Andrew Dessler, climate scientist and author of Climate Brink, told Ney and Siegel that the hope is that society would require policies to protect workers with things like required water breaks and reduced exposure to midday sun.
“However,” said Dessler, “ legislatures in Texas and Florida have actually prohibited cities from passing ordinances to protect workers. This is the opposite of what we need to do in the face of extreme heat.”
Further, Ney and Siegel report that there is still no federal workplace heat standard in the United States, and while OSHA proposed one in August 2024, it has stalled with no target date for finalization. At this time, they write that the agency only offers a heat inspection program. Only a handful of states, including California, Washington, Oregon, Colorado, and Minnesota, have their own heat safety rules, they report.
In Kentucky, the Kentucky General Assembly passed a law last year to agree to cap the state’s occupational safety standards at federal levels. Gov. Andy Beshear vetoed the measure, but the supermajority of Republican lawmakers overrode the veto ― “in effect, blocking Kentucky-specific protections on issues like heat exposure, and largely leaving the issue up to employers and putting the onus on Kentucky workers to look out for one another,” the Louisville Courier Journal reported in June.
In the absence of policies to help workers and in a world where extreme heat is the new baseline, Ney and Siegel report that some workers have organized their own protections.
Heat-related injury sent Kentucky workers to the hospital more than 500 times from 2019-24, according to a report from the Kentucky Injury Prevention and Research Center.