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

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.

The fatality was one of several over that decade suffered by telecommunications technicians on the job. According to the CWA, it was the last fatality since the union began pushing to include heat stress workplace standards in collective bargaining agreements.

“Unfortunately these catastrophic events have to occur to get employer’s adequate attention,” said David LeGrande, now retired Occupational Safety & Health Director for the CWA. The CWA represented Robinson at Verizon at the time of the incident, and LeGrande was one of the leads involved with the union’s investigation of Robinson’s death.

LeGrande said: “We are, to my knowledge, the first union that has negotiated protective language with employers. That has been carried out on a national basis.”

Verizon did not respond to requests for comment.

More heat days

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).

Related: Killer heat: US cities' plans for coming heatwaves fail to protect vulnerable

“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.”

In the California state assembly, Chu authored a bill for the California division of Occupational Safety and Health (Cal/Osha) to enforce heat standard protections for outdoor workers, which passed in 2005, making California the first state in the US to mandate employers to provide workers with periods of rest, shade and adequate water while doing outdoor work.

In 2015, the state of California settled two lawsuits brought by the United Farm Workers.

“Those called for greater protections for all outdoor workers in high heat temperatures and also called for establishing a mechanism where farmworkers can call us directly to report complaints to CalL/Osha,” said Marichel Meija, national field coordinator for the United Farm Workers Foundation. “We now have regular communications with Cal/Osha to ensure situations are investigated.”

Now the United Farm Workers and several other organizations are pushing for similar standards to be enforced across the US. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, between 1992 and 2016, 783 workers in the US died and more than 69,000 workers suffered serious injuries due to heat exposure on the job, though labor advocates argue the real numbers are even higher due to widespread under-reporting and employers misclassifying worker deaths as non-work-related.

“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.”

Heat inspections decreasing under Trump administration

As workers in the US are facing workplace environments that are getting hotter, and experiencing extreme temperatures more frequently, critics say the Trump administration has refused to address the problem. In an April 2019 report, the AFL-CIO noted federal Osha’s inspections related to heat declined by 49% under the Trump administration’s first two fiscal years in office.

More than 130 organizations petitioned Osha in 2018 to develop federal heat standards, with Chu prompted by the agency’s inaction to introduce legislation in Congress.

“This bill would have such a high impact for so many workers forced to work every day in conditions they can’t control,” said Reindel of the AFL-CIO union federation. “It’s a structure to identify the hazards. These programs are really good because workers are part of the process, and when workers are part of the process that’s when you get to the root of the problem.”

According to an Osha spokesperson, the agency launches a heat awareness campaign annually the Friday before Memorial Day, has been educating employers and workers about the dangers of working in heat since 2011, and in 2017 helped update an app for heat safety. The agency did not respond to requests for comment on petitions calling the agency to enact federal heat safety standards.