Amid Climate Disasters, Workers Demand a Right to Safety

Many years ago, I was a college student at home in Mississippi for the summer and in need of a temporary job. Lured by the promise of good pay, I took a job on the production line at a chicken plant.

I will never forget the air, pungent with the smell of feathers and machinery. Amid the sounds of clanging metal and whirring conveyor belts, dozens of chickens whizzed by every minute. My coworkers and I, clad in protective gear, worked as fast as we could to pluck feathers, detach limbs, and prep the carcasses for packaging. The work involved performing repetitive motions like cutting and slashing, hundreds of times every minute, for hours. If you were not precise, it was easy to wound yourself. It was exhausting and dangerous work, and I did not last long.

The grueling conditions left me aching and disillusioned—and while it was one of the better paying jobs around, my coworkers and I were underpaid given the work involved and the skill required to do it safely. My experience at the chicken plant led me to ask, “What is a good job? What would it take to make these jobs better?”

These are questions that I have worked to answer throughout my advocacy career—questions that have taken on renewed significance today, as worker organizing efforts gain momentum across industries and challenge major corporations. From Starbucks to Amazon, REI to Trader Joe’s, and Hollywood writers and actors to L.A. city workers, fed-up workers have been joining forces to assert their rights and improve their working conditions through collective action. According to the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations, there were 424 work stoppages of all sizes in 2022, involving at least 224,000 workers, representing a 52 percent increase compared to the previous year. Most strikes last year were in the food services and accommodations sector, which accounted for 34 percent of all work stoppages.

As these workers know, a good job means more than just monetary compensation; it encompasses safety, dignity, a role in determining working conditions, and the assurance of a brighter future. Through labor unions, worker centers, and community-based organizations, workers are challenging power imbalances and demanding just working conditions across a range of issues, including fair/living wages, the right to unionize, and the right to refuse unsafe work. 

Expansive calls for more power and protection at work are needed more than ever in the context of an accelerating climate crisis. Workers in every state will increasingly face climate-change-induced dangers in the workplace. This dramatic shift presents an opportunity to reimagine and move beyond an extractive, at-will economy—and instead build equity and respect for fundamental human rights into new paradigms for regulating work.

This past summer in particular saw a wave of workers striking for safer working conditions as the heat surpassed record temperatures in many states across the country. While the Biden administration has proposed executive actions to protect workers from extreme heat, and members of Congress have introduced legislation to hasten the adoption of a heat standard, these efforts face serious opposition, and a bill could take years to pass. In July 2023, Texas workers and their unions, together with lawmaker allies, held a thirst strike on the steps of the U.S. Capitol to call on the federal government to accelerate its work on these standards in light of a new Texas law that “preempts” or blocks cities and counties from adopting stronger protections on a range of issues covered by state law. This so-called “Death Star” law nullified local ordinances in Austin and Dallas requiring water breaks for construction workers, despite the fact that more workers die from heat in Texas than in any other state. The same month, cooks and cashiers at a McDonald’s in Los Angeles walked out and staged a rally over the restaurant’s broken air conditioning system.

Meanwhile, nearly 340,000 drivers, dispatchers, and warehouse workers employed by UPS threatened to strike starting in early August if the company didn’t start putting air conditioning in its trucks, among other demands. By threatening what would have been the largest single-employer strike in U.S. history, the workers were able to bring the company to a tentative agreement in late July. Amazon delivery drivers at a facility in Southern California, who are categorized as contractors rather than employees, have joined the Teamsters in hopes of negotiating for similar heat protections. They have been on indefinite strike since June.

Workers who are excluded from the right to organize, such as immigrant farmworkers, are also coming together to demand change, insisting that elected leaders in California; Oregon; Washington; Colorado; and Miami-Dade, Florida, put protections in place against heat stress and hold employers responsible for compliance.

While extreme heat and other unsafe working conditions are harmful to all workers, Black and Latinx workers disproportionately bear the brunt of the climate crisis. In general, Black and Latinx workers have been sorted into outdoor work and other manual jobs that subject them to climate disaster harms. Nationally, just under 22 percent of white workers are employed in at-risk jobs, while 25.5 percent of Black workers are in these industries, as are 36 percent of Latinx workers. In 14 states, Black workers face at least a 30 percent chance of being in an at-risk job. Clearly, Black and Latinx workers have been unjustly put at greater risk in these more dangerous jobs.

This is occupational segregation, the process of shunting workers into specific occupations based on their gender, race, ethnicity, or socioeconomic background. This practice significantly influences economic outcomes for Black people, people of color, immigrants, and women, profoundly impacting their wages, benefits, working conditions, and their capacity to speak out on the job or organize and form unions. And in the case of climate-related dangers, it has even resulted in Black and immigrant workers being forced to enter evacuation zones to work in the midst of disaster, even as public safety officials compel others to flee.