Extreme heat is putting America’s workers—and the economy—in danger. arynebaker reports on what can be done and what’s standing in the way
starting August 1, unless their demands for improved working conditions, including air-conditioned vehicles, were included in a new, five-year contract. While climate change was not specifically cited in the union demands, UPS’s unwillingness to adapt to the new realities of global warming by providing its employees with heat-adaptation strategies formed the subtext of the campaign.
By 11 a.m., George Guzman has turned off his blowtorch, stowed his tools, and called his team off the roofing project they have been working on since dawn. They will pick up again at 4 p.m., when the worst of the sun’s heat has burned away. Working up high, exposed to the sun with no shade in sight, and near boiling tar, roofers must tolerate far more heat than most other jobs.
A 90°F day might be perfect for the beach. But once you start working—lifting watermelons into a truck, sorting packages in the back of an overheated delivery van, spreading hot tar on a roof, or hauling garbage cans—your metabolism ramps up, burning fuel and raising the body’s core temperature. Your heart compensates by pumping blood away from your overheated organs to your skin, where dilating blood vessels can dissipate the heat with the help of evaporating sweat.
These deaths and injuries are often dismissed as unfortunate accidents, a sad but inevitable consequence of outdoor work in a warming world. When concentrated among the poor and migrants, the deaths and injuries can seem to carry less weight. “In some ways they are seen as implements of the harvest, not human beings,” says Dean Florez, a former California State Senator who successfully launched a heat protection standard for the state back in 2005.
After a long morning picking watermelon in the sun, Victor Manuel Montes Jasso and Jesus Lopez Damian snatch whatever rare shade they can find to scarf down a quick lunch of pinto beans and chicken pasta. They are both grateful for the break and dreading its end. “It’s always risky,” says Lopez. “The reality is that you have to kill yourself in the sun and the heat.” Gulping down a 2-liter soda bottle, Montes nods in agreement. “There isn’t really any way to protect ourselves from the sun.
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