labor

By Tushar Khurana - Grist, July 17, 2023

During a summer that has already shattered temperature records, the 340,000 drivers, dispatchers, and warehouse workers currently in contract negotiations with UPS — the United States’ largest unionized employer — have made climate change and extreme heat a headline labor issue. And if they don’t secure a contract by July 31, they are poised to initiate the largest single-employer strike in U.S. history.

On summer days, the back of a delivery truck can exceed 120 degrees Fahrenheit. When Viviana Gonzalez, a package delivery driver for United Postal Service in Los Angeles, pulls open the back of her truck, she often thinks: “Am I going to pass out back here? Will anybody find out that I’m here in the back of the truck?”

Gonzalez is all too aware of how dangerous her job can be. Since 2015, UPS has reported at least 143 heat-related injuries to the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Last year, one of her co-workers, Esteban Chavez, died of heat stroke in his delivery truck after delivering his last parcel. “I’m a single mom,” said Gonzalez, “and being able to provide for my son means I have to suck it up.”

By National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) - Clean Technica, July 9, 2023

North Carolina Workers, Employers would Benefit from State Heat Standards

RALEIGH, NC — According to a new report, North Carolina employers may be paying higher workers compensation claim costs in years with more hot weather. The Excessive Heat in North Carolina report found a link between extreme heat exposure in four major industries and avoidable costs to employers, including increased worker compensation for missed wages. The report was prepared by Milliman and commissioned by NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council).

The report’s key findings include:

• When all four industries (agriculture, construction/erection, cartage/trucking, and commercial enterprises) were considered together, there was a positive correlation between the annual number of hours with a heat index above 90°F and workers compensation claim costs for lost wages. In other words, employers paid employees more during hot years for missed work days due to illness or injury from any cause.
• The strongest relationships between heat and workers compensation costs for lost wages were in the cartage/trucking industry (such as package delivery and ambulance service workers) and commercial enterprises (such as warehouse workers and gas station attendants). The positive correlation between hot years and the severity of lost wage claims (i.e. the cost per claim) was notably strong in cartage/trucking.
• Based on the available sample data, cartage/trucking was the only industry to show a significant positive correlation between heat and workers compensation claims for medical costs.
• Outside the workers compensation system, heat was correlated with healthcare use by the general population immediately after extreme heat events and for up to three months later. However, the observed relationship depended on a complex interaction between heat, an individual’s other health conditions, and socioeconomic factors such as living conditions and access to healthcare.

“Workers are protected from all kinds of hazards, such as ladder falls and electric shocks. But federally and in most states—including in North Carolina—there are no such standards protecting workers from heat. That needs to be fixed, and fast, especially as climate change makes heat season ever more brutal in the Southeast and across the country,” said Juanita Constible, Senior Advocate for Climate & Health at NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council). “The report makes clear that the avoidable costs of workplace heat exposure, such as missed work time and emergency room visits, are considerable in four of the most heat-exposed industries in North Carolina.”

“Everyone has the right to a safe and healthy workplace. We should be doing everything we can to avoid preventable injuries at work like those caused by exposure to high temperatures,” said Clermont Fraser Ripley, Workers’ Rights Project Co-Director at the North Carolina Justice Center. “We should be doing everything we can to avoid preventable injuries at work like those caused by exposure to high temperatures.”

By Michael Sainato - The Guardian, June 30, 2023

Last week as the heat dome scorched Texas, Gloria Machuca arrived for work at a McDonald’s in Houston to find the air conditioning wasn’t working. The temperature inside the restaurant was similar to the temperature outside – at least 90F. It was 7.30am.

Temperatures would rise another 10 degrees that day but already, Machuca said, the intense heat was making her eyes burn. She and five of her co-workers walked out on their jobs.

A third week of a record-breaking heatwave has placed at least 40 million people in the US under heat alerts, with numerous Texas cities experiencing unprecedented heat.

Many workers in Texas and throughout the southern US currently have no heat protection while working outdoors, exposed to the sun and intense, prolonged heat.

“When I came in, it really was so hot. I decided I need to go on strike. I told my co-workers because it is way too hot here and I knew they were all extremely hot as well,” said Machuca. “If we don’t work, they don’t make money. They’re making money off our sweat and it’s not fair,” she said. “It’s time they truly value us.”

Marsam Management, which operates the McDonald’s store in Houston, said in a statement: “As soon as we learned that one of our three air conditioning units had malfunctioned, we immediately brought portable air coolers and fans into the kitchen while technicians made their repairs, which were completed that same day.”

But workers went on strike again on 27 June to demand a permanent fix to the air conditioning issues and workers walked out at a second McDonald’s location in Houston over the same issues – air conditioning not working properly.

“I couldn’t take the heat any more. It was way too hot inside and I said I have to do something because they’re not listening to us,” said Marina Luria Ramírez, a McDonald’s worker at the second location who walked out. “It’s almost like you’re being choked, it’s such a horrible feeling. And there’s times where I feel like I’m going to faint and I try to drink water but sometimes our mouths are so dry, like even water doesn’t work. We try anything we can to recover but it really is a physically tolling and despairing experience.”

By Garrett Bradford, Robert J. Meyer, Joanne Buckle, Philip S. Borba, Sheryl Hou, Rong Yi, and Kailey Adams - Millman, June 27, 2023

Extreme heat events are the largest source of weather-related mortality in the United States, with documented impacts on both workers compensation claims, negative health outcomes, and increased emergency department visits. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), approximately 51 million U.S. workers are at high risk to extreme heat based on their occupation, yet only 9 million live in states with permanent workplace heat standards.

NRDC recently engaged Milliman to study the relationship between workers compensation costs, healthcare services utilization, and excessive heat in North Carolina, a state with no workplace heat standards, where an estimated 1.7 million workers (27% of the workforce) are at high risk to extreme heat.

This report summarizes the research methods and findings, which included a strong correlation between indemnity costs and the heat index of annual hours above static threshold (90°F) for the groups of workers that were studied.

This report was commissioned by NRDC.

Download a copy of this publication here (link).

Interview of Marti Garza - The Texas Labor Podcast, June 25, 2023

By Farah Eltohamy - Crosscut, June 15, 2023

Lorena, a former farmworker from Sunnyside, toiled day and night tending to blueberries in Washington’s Yakima Valley for close to a decade.

By year six, Lorena’s employer had elevated her to a supervisory role – which she said she personally took as an opportunity to better advocate for her fellow farmworkers out in the sweltering summer conditions.

Lorena, who asked to be identified by her first name only to avoid any potential reprisal from her former employer, regularly reported any problems she saw with lack of access to adequate water and shade – and over the years was met with repeated retaliation that she said ultimately drove her out of the career in 2021.

The heat is becoming more extreme each passing year, Lorena told Crosscut, but most changes to working conditions seem for “the benefit of the fruit, not for the benefit of farmworkers.” 

Agricultural workers are among those most vulnerable to heat-related illnesses, and according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention they’re dying of heatstroke at a rate nearly 20 times greater than all U.S. civilian workers. 

By Kerry Taylor-Smith - Chartered Institute of Environmental Health, March 9, 2023

World’s largest trial finds four-day week reaps environmental and health benefits.

Trial suggests that 91% of organisations will continue with a four-day week as employees are happier, less tired, and adopt more pro-environmental behaviours

A four-day working week with no loss of pay could reduce the UK’s carbon emissions by 127 million tonnes – the equivalent of removing the UK’s entire private car fleet from the road - and could help the country meet its binding climate targets.

The world’s largest trial into a reduced working week involved over 60 companies and almost 3,000 workers; it found a four-day week could reduce commuting time by around half an hour per week and slash energy usage in the workplace.

“While definitive estimates of carbon impacts are nearly impossible to put together, we do see encouraging trends on a number of dimensions in our trials: reduced commuting time, reduced commuting by car, people reporting more pro-environmental behaviours over the course of the trial, and absence of a significant travel rebound. These vary a bit across the completed trials but not by a lot,” said Juliet Schor, an economist and sociologist at Boston College and lead researcher at 4 Day Week Global.

Environmental consultancy, Tyler Grange participated in the six-month trial; they reported a daily productivity increase of 22%, and a 21% reduction in the number of miles travelled by car by cutting out unnecessary meetings and travel.

By Daniel Werst - Left Voice, August 18, 2022

The NLRB is imposing a $13 million fine on the UMWA coal miners’ union over a protracted strike in central Alabama. Not just a fine, in fact, but monetary restitution to the company that the strikers are fighting. What explains this profoundly anti-labor decision?

On August 3, the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) and the Associated Press reported that the subunit of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) for Region 10 (much of the South) has ordered the union to pay $13.3 million to Warrior Met Coal.

About 1,000 workers from two mines and two aboveground facilities southwest of Birmingham, Alabama, have been on strike against Warrior Met since April 2021, resisting brutal working conditions. Now the Biden NLRB is demanding the UMWA pay what amounts to $13,000 per striker into the company’s pocket. The government says this is reimbursement for security guards, security cameras, repairs, and production lost because of the strike, plus buses for carrying scabs across picket lines.

This workforce routinely does six-day weeks and 12-hour days. The company operates on Sundays and almost all holidays. A hated company policy fires workers automatically if they miss four days of work in a year, even because of health problems or family emergencies.

Early in the strike, the company offered a raise of $1.50 an hour for 2021 to 2026. Workers retorted that back in 2016 they accepted a $6-an-hour reduction when the company declared bankruptcy and threatened mass layoffs if the workers didn’t “help” shore up its profitability. More than 95 percent of the strikers voted no when the UMWA leadership put up this company offer as a tentative agreement.

The $13.3 million NLRB judgment is more than half of the strike pay distributed to 1,000 strikers in 16 months. The UMWA provides only $350 a week, or $18,000 a year, for miners’ families to live on. The money grab goes to a company that made $146 million in profit for January to March this year and last year paid its CEO $5.7 million.

By staff - United Mine Workers Of America, August 3, 2022

The United Mine Workers of America today made it clear that it will vigorously challenge an outrageous assessment of damages made by the National Labor Relations Board Region 10 regarding the UMWA’s 16-month strike against Warrior Met Coal in Alabama.

“This is a slap in the face not just to the workers who are fighting for better jobs at Warrior Met Coal, but to every worker who stands up to their boss anywhere in America,” UMWA International President Cecil E. Roberts said. “There are charges for security, cameras, capital expenditures, buses for transporting scabs across picket lines, and the cost of lost production.

“What is the purpose of a strike if not to impact the operations of the employer, including production,” Roberts asked. “Is it now the policy of the federal government that unions be required to pay a company’s losses as a consequence of their members exercising their rights as working people? This is outrageous and effectively negates workers’ right to strike. It cannot stand.”

The union entered into a settlement agreement in June with NLRB Region 10 regarding charges the company had made about picket line activity in order to save striking members and families from days of hostile questioning by company lawyers. On July 22, the NLRB sent the union a detailed list of damages totaling $13.3 million dollars, more than 33 times the estimated amount NLRB lawyers had initially indicated would be assessed.

Warrior Met has reported millions of dollars in costs it has incurred over the course of the strike. “It appears that Warrior Met wants us to reimburse it for those costs, including costs it incurred before the strike even began,” Roberts said. “What’s extremely troubling here is that the NLRB appears to have taken up the company’s cause without a second thought.

“I want to be clear: Warrior Met Coal instigated this strike and has brutally extended it through its sustained unwillingness to reach a fair and reasonable agreement at the bargaining table,” Roberts said. “We have no intention of paying its costs for doing so. The right to strike in America must be preserved. We will fight this at every level, in every court. We will spend every penny of our resources rather than give in to something like this from the NLRB, Warrior Met or any other entity.”

By Turner Cotterman, Erica R.H. Fuchs, and Kate Whitefoot - Carnegie Mellon University, July 22, 2022

The ongoing shift from traditional internal combustion engine vehicles (ICEVs) to electric vehicles (EVs) has raised questions about whether this transition will be economically as well as environmentally sustainable. In particular, one concern is the impact on manufacturing labor. Prior studies of the anticipated impacts of vehicle electrification on manufacturing labor requirements are mixed, with some suggesting that producing EVs may require fewer labor hours and jobs than conventional gasoline vehicles and some suggesting that there will be limited impacts on labor outcomes. Moreover, analysis of labor implications has been hindered by a lack of shop floor-level data on the labor hours required for ICEV and EV manufacturing. We collect detailed data on the production process steps required to build key ICEV and battery electric vehicle (BEV) powertrain components and the labor required for each process step.

The data include information for 252 process steps, which we collected from the shop floors of leading automotive manufacturers and combine with information on a further 78 process steps found in the existing literature. We then use this data to build a production process model that determines the labor hours required to produce ICEV and BEV powertrain components in a variety of scenarios of different production volumes and labor efficiency levels. We find that, in all scenarios we explore, the labor intensity required for the manufacturing of BEV powertrain components is larger than for ICEV powertrain components. Our results imply that vehicle electrification may lead to more jobs in powertrain manufacturing, at least in the short- to medium-term. These results emphasize the importance of using information about manufacturing process tasks and labor requirements to estimate the labor impacts of EVs, rather than recent approaches concentrating on part counts.