Rising temperatures put more US workers at risk of dying from heat

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jan/22/heat-deaths-workers-safety-climate-crisis

Michael Sainato
Wed 22 Jan 2020 03.00 EST
Last modified on Wed 22 Jan 2020 03.02 EST

It was more than 100F (38C) in the attic where telephone technician Brent Robinson was working.

The 55-year-old, who had worked for 30 years at Verizon, was installing a phone service for a residential customer in Rancho Cucamonga, 40 miles east of Los Angeles in southern California.

He had been out for days sick earlier in the week.

After he finished the job in Rancho Cucamonga, he collapsed in the car park of a grocery store where he had gone for a cool drink; paramedics could not revive him.

Robinson, who died in 2011, is one of dozens of workers who die every year because of heat exposure. In 2018, 60 workers died due to temperature extremes, according to the most recent Bureau of Labor Statistics data on workplace fatalities.

Though the climate crisis is creating conditions where workers are facing hotter temperatures on a more frequent basis, there are no federal safety protections for workers in extreme temperatures, and only three states, California, Washington and Minnesota, have heat stress workplace protection standards.

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According to projections conducted by the not-for-profit organization Climate Central, the number of dangerous heat days for 133 US cities, will increase from 20 a year on average in 2000 to 58 in 2050. A dangerous heat day is defined as one in which the heat index, accounting for heat and humidity, exceeds 104F (40C).

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“Climate change means it’s only getting hotter, and workers are at exposure for all kinds of excessive heat,” Judy Chu, a Democratic congresswoman from California, told the Guardian.

Earlier this year, she introduced the Asuncion Valdivia Heat Illness and Fatality Prevention Act of 2019, which would direct the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Osha) to issue and enforce standards to protect workers from heat-related risks on the job.

Chu said: “It all started when I was in the California state assembly. The United Farm Workers came to me about the situation with Asuncion Valdivia. He was a farmworker picking grapes for 10 hours straight when he collapsed in 105F temperatures.

“Instead of having any kind of proper treatment for him, a supervisor told his son to take him home. They didn’t even call an ambulance. On the way home, the son saw his father foam at the mouth, fall over and die. So the son had to watch his father die of a preventable heat stroke.”

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“We’ve had issues where workers are not classified as dying because of their job when we know that is the case,” said Rebecca Reindel, senior safety and health specialist at the AFL-CIO union federation. “With heat you’re running into a lot of vulnerable workers, immigrant workers, where employers will pass it off, say something else happened, and no one is following up and that person’s family don’t know their rights to get it classified as a workplace fatality.”

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