AS THE HOT AND HUMID DMV SUMMER comes to a close (...right?), it’s probably no surprise to anyone who sweat through the summer that we once again broke the record for the hottest day ever recorded on Earth this July. The oppressive heat is widespread, with a record 15 national heat records broken since the start of 2024. And while no one can fully escape a burning heatwave, it’s the working class across the world who will pay the highest price.
Here in the United States, the lowest-paid workers have five times as many heat-related injuries as the highest-paid workers, with 43 reported fatalities in 2022 alone due to extreme heat exposure. And this is likely an undercount due to failure to report by employers. Despite this, there are no federal laws on the books to protect workers from extreme heat. What does exist? Only broad regulations like the Occupational Safety and Health Act’s General Duty Clause that are far too vague to consistently enforce protections for workers.
As of 2020, over 70 percent of workers are exposed to excessive heat globally, an almost 35 percent increase from 2000. Workers in Africa, the Arab States, Asia, and the Pacific region have the most workers exposed to extreme heat, whil European and Central Asian regions are seeing the highest increase in heat exposure at almost double the average rate. The Americas have the fastest increasing proportion of heat-related occupational injuries since the year 2000, with increases of 33.3 percent.
In less than twenty-five years, these are monumental changes. And international human rights standards and national laws have failed to keep pace with this tinderbox of rising temperatures. And heatwaves become the new normal—the workers who grow the world’s food, make our clothes, and deliver these goods and more can’t beat the heat by logging into work from their air-conditioned water front properties like our capitalist bosses. Instead, workers must organize ourselves to collectively bargain for not only the heat protections we need but to transform the capitalist system heating up our planet.
The 2.4 million farmworkers in the United States are some of the lowest paid workers in the country, earning only an average hourly wage of $14.62. Almost two thirds of all agricultural workers are immigrants, and nearly half of these workers have no legal work authorization. Looking at only those with a work visa—usually the U.S. H-2A status—agricultural workers work in two thirds of all U.S. counties. And the counties with the largest numbers of workers with the H-2A status are in some of the hottest places in the country, including Florida, Arizona, Georgia, New Mexico, and Texas, where local temperatures exceed 90°F (32°C) on average during the growing season.
Farm workers have long organized to address poor working conditions. Perhaps most famously, Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta founded what is now United Farm Workers (UFW) in the 1960s. The fight continues today, even though farm workers are still not covered by the federal regulations for labor organizing under the National Labor Relations Board. Stronger protections from the Department of Labor did go into place for US H-2A workers this June, and state laws can allow for union organizing in states such as California.
Despite the confusing patchwork of regulations that ultimately does not give farm workers the protections they need to organize without fear of retaliation, organizations like the UFW have made significant progress in unionizing where it is possible and pushing for a federal heat standard to protect all farm workers. This new standard, proposed by the Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) this summer, will require worker access to clean drinking water and shaded and/or indoor rest areas. The new standard also establishes that workers have the right to take regular rest breaks and that employers must educate and train workers about these rights, as well as implement a climate acclimatization plan for workers. The public comment period on this standard is currently open, and the UFW is organizing workers and their allies to leave positive comments by the deadline on December 30, 2024. You can leave your comment right now through this link.
Just like the food we eat everyday, the clothes we wear are produced by workers on the frontlines of extreme heat. In Cambodia, two thirds of garment workers are already experiencing climate change impacts of rising temperatures, air pollution, and more unpredictable weather. Cambodia experiences some of the highest temperatures in the world, with an estimated national average of 64 days per year when the maximum temperature exceeds 95°F. Daily temperatures are already around 1.8°F hotter than 1960. But labor law in Cambodia is still based on a 1997 labor law, which provides no guidelines or requirements on workplace temperatures.
As is often the case, there is little incentive for businesses to address the sweltering heat their workers must endure daily. Many of the factories our clothes are produced in are actually warehouses, not intended for humans to work in for hours on end. And these buildings are usually rented. That means business owners have no incentive to invest in built infrastructure like fans, air conditioning, or other cooling technologies (because, of course, workers passing out from heat exhaustion is no incentive to a capitalist). Government capacity to monitor working conditions to enforce regulations is limited, and as mentioned, the regulations themselves are lacking. Make no mistake—this is a global problem, not Cambodia’s alone. A 2016 report by the Garment Worker Center in Los Angeles surveyed 300 garment workers and found 50 percent of workers reported poor ventilation while 73.5 percent claimed an alarming absence of clean drinking water, despite this violating OSHA regulations. And workers are paid only an average of $5.17 per hour to work in these conditions.
Garment workers across the world are organizing to fight back against the $2.5 trillion fashion industry that has largely focused on climate mitigation efforts like using recycled fabrics, while ignoring the ongoing impact of extreme heat on workers. Global Labor Justice is organizing the #GarmentMeToo campaign, led by women workers and trade union leaders to contribute to new international labor standards that address poor working conditions. The campaign is focused on combating the gender-based violence and harassment that many garment workers face on a daily basis and is building the organizing power to tackle demands around climate, wages, and more.
Organizing gets the goods (delivered to you)
Like farm workers in the fields and garment workers in the factories, delivery drivers are on the frontlines of extreme heat—an analysis of OSHA data from 2015 to 2022 found that delivery and mail workers had the second-highest rates of heat-related illness. On the hottest days of the year, the back of a delivery truck can hit up to 120°F. Often working in trucks without air conditioning and running up driveways to make deliveries fast enough to hit quotas, workers at UPS, FedEx, and the postal service have to face the heat head on.
Last year, 340,000 UPS workers, unionized with Teamsters, took up a new demand in their collective bargaining: climate adaptation. After months of negotiation and threats of a strike of the largest unionized workforce in the United States, the UPS Teamsters won a new union contract. The contract addressed extreme heat by requiring that trucks purchased after January 1, 2024 have air conditioning and that 28,000 package cars in the existing fleet be retrofitted with cooling devices by the contract’s end on July 31, 2028.
DSA chapters around the country supported the UPS Teamsters during contract negotiations, passing Strike Ready resolutions that committed our local chapters to coordinating with their local unions, getting sign-ons for the Strike Ready Pledge, and running fundraisers for the DSA Labor Solidarity Fund to support workers financially if they went on strike. A strike was ultimately not necessary to secure the contract, but this kind of solidarity is critical to supporting workers during the fight.
The final contract represented a shift in what workplace safety means. It’s no longer just about specific safety issues like a dangerous piece of equipment, but also about extreme heat as a pervasive, external problem employers still have a responsibility to address. But now, a year later, the union reports that UPS has not purchased any new vehicles since the January 1 deadline, and only a tiny fraction of workers have gotten access to cooling technology so far. Teamsters for a Democratic Union, the organization’s progressive wing, is now working to educate UPS drivers about the benefits they are entitled to under the new contract and hold UPS accountable.
As workers across the world know all too well, we are already into the fire. Global warming shows no signs of slowing down, and the heatwaves, high temperatures, and unpredictable weather it brings will be felt first and hardest by the working class. Extreme heat is here to stay. Government regulations are dragging behind the breakneck pace of the climate crisis. If we want to protect ourselves from the heat, we must follow the examples of farm workers, garment workers, delivery drivers, and all those getting organized to demand what we need to survive. Strong, organized unions are essential to both winning heat protections and ensuring our bosses follow through on contract wins. And whether you face the heat in your day-to-day work or not, as workers continue to negotiate heat protections into their union contracts and advocate for national regulations and international standards, we all have opportunities to show our solidarity with everyone sweating it out to get the job done:
Claire Mills is an ecosocialist and community organizer in Washington, DC. She got her start organizing a successful fossil fuel divestment campaign as a student, and now organizes with DC’s campaign for public power—We Power DC. Claire also currently serves on DSA’s Green New Deal Campaign Commission Steering Committee and the Metro DC DSA Steering Committee.
