Unchecked Climate Change Will Make Life Hellish for Outdoor Workers: Report, 'Too Hot To Work'

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- Mother Jones, Aug. 18, 2021. A new analysis forecasts the effect of global warming on labor. This story was originally published by HuffPost.

As temperatures in the Pacific Northwest soared above 110 degrees in late June, workers in Oregon flooded the state’s Occupational Safety and Health Division with safety complaints. In Klamath Falls, roofers worked in blistering heat and thick smoke from nearby wildfires “with little to no shade and no breaks for a long period of time,” one complaint read. At a job site in Clackamas, workers reportedly installed fencing without access to fresh water and with only a total of 35 minutes of breaks throughout the day.

The devastating heat wave, which killed more than 100 people in Oregon alone, offers a sobering glimpse at what lies ahead for outdoor laborers. Without an aggressive global effort to rein in greenhouse gas emissions, extreme heat will wreak havoc on construction, agricultural, extraction, delivery and other outdoor sectors, warns a new report from the Union of Concerned Scientists.

The report, published on Tuesday, concludes that if climate change continues unchecked, the number of days outdoor workers in the US are exposed to hazardous heat could quadruple by mid-century. Up to $55.4 billion in annual earnings would be put at risk. And it would come with dire inequitiesof the approximately 32 million outdoor workers in the United States, more than 40% are non-white. That US laborers are still suffering due to a lack of appropriate protections is nothing short of “cruel,” said Rachel Licker, the report’s lead author and a climate scientist at UCS.

“That’s often the tragedy with these injuries and deaths is that they’re typically preventable,” she said. “It’s about affording people, oftentimes, basic human rights—access to shade, drinking water, the ability to take a break when they’re on the job—so they’re not in a position of having to choose between their health and a paycheck.” The report, titled “Too Hot to Work,” builds upon the nonprofit advocacy organization’s 2019 analysis on climate-fueled extreme heat...

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https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2021/08/climate-change-global-warming-heat-labor-outdoor-work/