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On The Front Lines: Climate Change Threatens the Health of America's Workers
By Juanita Constible, Bora Chang, Clare Morganelli, and Nikole Blandon - Natural Resources Defense Council, June 2020
The climate crisis is dramatically changing the work environment for American workers, making existing workplace hazards worse and creating new ones. Outdoor workers will be exposed to more severe heat, more toxic substances, and a heightened risk of infectious diseases; indoor workers will struggle in buildings without air conditioners. As increasingly extreme weather events destroy infrastructure and threaten communities, first responders and cleanup crews will face ever more frequent, exhausting, and dangerous deployments. Yet, thanks to regulatory rollbacks, loopholes, and a lack of urgency, federal and state agencies are not holding employers accountable for unsafe and unhealthy work practices.
This NRDC report brings together the latest research along with new reporting to better understand the many climate-related risks workers face, and how we can address them to improve worker safety in our changing world. To help today’s workers, we need lawmakers, regulators, employers, unions, other worker organizations, and workers themselves to start adapting to a fundamentally different world. Protecting worker health from the impacts of the climate crisis is fully within our grasp—but will only get harder the longer we wait to act.
Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author.
The Fine Print I:
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The Fine Print II:
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