Workers: the Climate Canaries

Last March, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued another round of critical warnings: evidence for climate change is unequivocal, projected impacts are occurring and accelerating, and recent experience with severe weather events reveals tremendous human vulnerability, particularly for populations living in poverty.¹ It is clear that the United States is in a position of playing catch-up on many climate change fronts. One of those is in recognizing that climate change puts hundreds of thousands of workers in jeopardy.

While the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and others have provided leadership in putting occupational health front and center in their models of human health impacts of climate change,^2,3 to date, US climate researchers and federal agencies have largely overlooked workers in their summary of the impacts of climate change on human health and have failed to identify the disproportionate impact on many classifications of workers, particularly workers who are already economically marginalized.⁴ US federal agencies have properly paid attention to “climate vulnerable” populations, such as chronic disease sufferers, the elderly, and children, but again and again, workers fail to make the list.⁵ The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s brief “Policy on Climate and Health” includes several categories of vulnerable populations, including athletes and the agricultural sector, but workers are not explicitly identified.⁶ Additionally, the environmental justice framework has been extended to scrutinize the potential disproportionate impact of climate change on populations currently marginalized by their race, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status. However “climate justice” has not specifically been targeted to working populations.⁷

Workers qualify for particular attention and protection because unlike those who may be at greater liberty to respond, adapt, and escape the impacts of climate change, workers’ exposure and their response is controlled by the requirements of their jobs and employers. Their exposures are a direct consequence of their employment and, therefore, their working conditions and exposures are largely under the control of their employers. Workers’ choices to take individual action to respond and to adapt to the effects of climate change may be severely constrained. Even their access to adequate drinking water, rest, and shade cannot be assumed.

In addition to significant numbers of workers potentially affected, there is also immense diversity in the occupational sectors that are and will continue to be disproportionately exposed and affected by climate change impacts. Exposures include temperature extremes, severe weather events, air pollution, weather-dependent infectious and zoonotic diseases, wild fires, and safety hazards from working at heights, with machinery, live power, confined space, and destroyed buildings and landscapes.⁸ All of these have documented occupational mortality and morbidity, likely to increase in a changing climate, including the effects of heat stress, Lyme disease, traumatic and chronic physical and emotional stress, and high rates of fatal falls. Vast numbers of workers potentially affected include those working in (at least) emergency response, construction, utility, demolition, clean-up, landscaping, agriculture, forestry, wildlife management, postal service and delivery, warehouse, heavy industry, and a number of manufacturing settings. These occupations and employment sectors are urban and rural, and outdoors and indoors. Even more are cataloged among the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) grim list of heat- related deaths: 112 since May 2008 (https://www.osha.gov/SLTC/heatillness/map_text.html).

Climate change is also expected to increase employment in what are already the most hazardous occupations including many of those listed above.⁹ Hazards endemic to these occupations such as high ambient temperatures, chemical and biomechanical exposures, and safety hazards will be compounded and aggravated by the temperature, air pollution, and new safety hazards introduced by climate change. For instance, extreme temperatures will exacerbate the hazards of working at elevations, physically demanding work and long hours will take a greater toll, and chemical exposures combined with warmer temperatures will result in toxicity at lower levels.¹⁰ During higher temperatures, personal protective equipment such as respirators and protective clothing will be increasingly unbearable. Worker productivity will be negatively impacted, and both workers and employers will suffer the economic consequences.¹¹ Additionally, inadequate attention has been paid to the hazards present in climate change mitigation employment, often labeled as “green jobs,” including safety hazards associated with wind and solar installation and maintenance, chemical exposures in isocyanate spray foam insulation, and the numerous hazards (including climate change exposures) present in biofuels agriculture.^12,13

Most climate change impacts, such as the effects of extreme heat, are not specific to workers. However, workers may serve the function of “canaries in the coal mine” of climate change impacts. Workers’ bodies have sounded the alarm in several cases of chemical exposure, such as the pesticide DBCP, the flavoring agent diacetyl, and latex as an allergen, which then lead to investigations of broader population impact. In those cases, as in the case of climate change effects, workers’ exposures are greater in frequency, duration, and intensity and, thus, represent the “sentinel cases” that sound the alert to the larger society health effects. One example of workers potentially serving as climate canaries may be witnessed in the world’s sugar cane fields. In the increasing heat intensity experienced in Central America sugar plantations, more than 20 000 workers have died from chronic kidney disease most likely caused by combined exposure to extreme temperature, pesticide exposures, a “piece work” payment system, and other employment conditions that prevent adequate hydration, rest, and protection from chemical exposures.^14–19 (Ironically, global sugar agriculture is booming because of the demand for “climate-neutral” biofuels.²⁰) There is no global nor US surveillance system that can detect sentinel cases of climate-related occupational illness and injury, nor one to monitor, report, and respond to cases.⁵

Employers may not be sufficiently prepared, empowered, educated, concerned, or compelled to protect their employees from the health impacts of climate change. There has not been any national regulatory action, and only limited state action, to compel employers to recognize climate change-related impacts such as sustained durations of high temperatures as occupational hazards from which they must protect their employees.^21–23 In 2013, OSHA cited the US Postal Service under the general duty clause for not implementing a heat stress management program following the heat-related death of Massachusetts postal worker James Baldassarre. Baldassarre collapsed after walking his route for five hours carrying a mail bag weighing up to 35 pounds in 94-degree heat with a heat index in excess of 100 degrees.²⁴ However, the rare enforcement of the general duty of employers to protect workers from recognized hazards, voluntary standards, and social marketing campaigns for heat stress awareness have not led to adequate worker protection.²⁵ On the contrary, the media reports cases such as the AT&T workers in Texas who are prohibited from using air conditioning in their trucks and Amazon.com warehouse workers who work in 120-degree environments without relief.^24,26–28

Part of climate change preparedness must include a frank assessment of the adequacy and gaps in the capacity of government regulatory agencies to protect workers from likely impacts. Currently, the regulatory framework is inadequate for protecting the most vulnerable workers who are also the workers most likely to be impacted, such as farm workers and public employees. Immigrant workers, and workers with other labor market vulnerabilities such as informal and contingent employment (day labor), piece work pay schemes, absence of sick days, remote work locations, limited regulatory oversight, and low wages, are heavily represented in occupations likely to be affected by climate change.²⁹

There are no regulatory standards at the federal level covering well-established climate change–related hazards such as musculoskeletal overloading and extreme temperatures. The historical occupational health and safety regulatory pace spells doom in a scenario where urgent action is necessary. The infrastructure of change is nowhere near “nimble” enough to adequately respond to increased risks and to compel employers to reduce the impact of hazards by changing the work environment. There are several poignant examples of this major regulatory weakness headlined by OSHA’s inability to issue an emergency heat stress standard (http://www.citizen.org/documents/denial-of-heat-stress-petition.pdf).

However, increased recognition of worker vulnerability and regulatory shortcomings may represent an opportunity to empower OSHA, as well as other agencies, public health organizations, and employers, to act. The standards for the training and protection of hazardous waste clean-up and lead paint abatement workers were mandated by other agencies that recognized the need for worker protection from environmental hazards. These examples of interagency cooperation can provide a model for protecting workers from climate change impacts. However, it is critical that efforts like the ongoing US Global Change Research Program’s Interagency Special Report on the Impacts of Climate Change on Human Health in the United States identify workers in vulnerability assessments.³⁰

Attention to workers’ vulnerability means that climate change impacts as a set of occupational exposures should be anticipated and addressed through action by employers and regulatory agencies. The environmental justice framework calls on public agencies to recognize that the most vulnerable should not be the most impacted by potential environmental harm. Action can be taken at federal, state, and local levels to reduce workers’ climate change vulnerabilities and thereby contribute to the “co-benefits” of climate change adaptation and mitigation.