health and safety

By Max Alvarez and Jeff Kurtz - Real News Network, February 1, 2022

By Elana Kessler and Richard Marcantonio - Labor Notes, January 21, 2022

Oakland transit worker Connie McFarland drove home after a long shift last July 28 and logged onto Zoom for a board meeting of her employer, AC Transit. She joined a chorus of 40 workers and riders who held up the start of the agenda with nearly two hours of public comment.

Their demand: hazard pay for frontline transit workers.

Bus operator Sultana Adams, an assistant shop steward with Transit (ATU) Local 192, described the trauma of an assault by a rider who spat in her face. McFarland told the board, “We really would like to have some form of appreciation that’s more than lip service.”

By coming together around this popular demand, Bay Area transit workers built power across unions in the lead-up to their contract campaigns and fought to improve transit for their riders.

By staff - 350 Bay Area, November 3, 2021

In an era where many things don’t make sense (and are frequently enraging), the way we treat our essential workers still manages to stand out. We’ve been reminded of just how important farmworkers, truckers, and grocery workers are to providing affordable, accessible food, and to keeping our economy humming along. But still – minimum wage hasn’t budged in over a decade, and worker protections in the US rank behind almost every other country in the world.

The worst, though, and by far, is the way we treat farmworkers, particularly our undocumented community members. As Jean Guerrero’s excellent piece in the LA Times points out, California depends on 500,000 undocumented farmworkers (about 75% of the total needed to harvest our crops), yet these critically important community members are treated incredibly badly: wages are poor to begin with, and wage theft is rampant; the work is physically demanding, often damaging onto dangerous; and they face living in fear every day because they are willing to do this difficult work to feed their families. The injustice is outrageous.

By staff - Rights and Accountability in Development (RAID) and the Centre d’Aide Juridico-Judiciaire (CAJJ), November 2021

Cobalt is everywhere. It is a silvery-blue mineral used in the rechargeable batteries that power our mobile phones, laptops and tablets, and in larger quantities, the electric vehicles that will soon dominate our roads. It is a strategic mineral in the plan to decarbonise and move away from fossil fuels towards renewable energy. Accelerating this switch is one of the priorities to tackle the climate crisis and industry experts forecast that electric vehicle sales will skyrocket in the next 10 years. This will require a dramatic increase in cobalt production.

The booming demand for cobalt has a dark side, however. The Democratic Republic of Congo, one of Africa’s poorest nations, holds the lion’s share of the world’s cobalt reserves. In 2020, 70% of the world’s cobalt was extracted from within its borders with tens of thousands of workers labouring in large-scale industrial mines to dig up the ore. Multinational mining companies that own many of Congo’s mines, eager to demonstrate their “green” and “responsible” credentials, say they produce “clean” and “sustainable” cobalt, free from human rights abuses, and that their operations contribute to good jobs and economic opportunities.

This report, based on extensive research over two years, paints a very different picture. It shows dire conditions for many Congolese workers in the industrial mines, often characterised by widespread exploitation and labour rights abuses. Many workers do not earn a “living wage” – the minimum remuneration to afford a decent standard of living – have little or no health provision, and far too often are subjected to excessive working hours, unsafe working conditions, degrading treatment, discrimination and racism.

In recent years attention has mainly focused on Congo’s artisanal mining sector, partly because of the risks of child labour it creates, whereas the conditions for workers in the large-scale industrial mines have gone largely unnoticed. This report examines workers’ rights at Congo’s industrial mines where the large majority of cobalt is coming from, producing some 80% of the cobalt exported from the country (in contrast to the 20% produced in artisanal mines).

The findings presented in this report are based on detailed research over 28 months by UK-based corporate watchdog Rights and Accountability in Development (RAID) and the Centre d’Aide Juridico- Judiciaire (CAJJ), a Congolese legal aid centre specialised in labour rights. The research team carried out extensive field research in and around Kolwezi, a mining town where many of Congo’s cobalt and copper mines are located. It is informed by 130 interviews of workers and former workers at five mining companies, as well as interviews with subcontractors, union representatives, lawyers, Congolese local authorities, medical staff and industry experts.

Read the text (PDF).

By Matthew Sedacca - The Counter, September 6, 2021

With record-breaking temperatures blanketing the country and no federal heat standard in place, workers find they have no choice but to walk out.

As a heat dome blanketed Portland, Oregon in late June, workers at Voodoo Doughnut’s Old Town location found themselves crumbling in their store. Even with air-conditioning in the shop, ambient thermometers brought in by staff recorded interior temperatures upward of 96 degrees. Workers were breaking out in heat hives and doubling over from nausea. The company’s iconic Bacon Maple Bar doughnuts, with their frosting unable to set due to the heat, literally melted into soggy brown mush.

The high-90 temperatures in the Old Town location were already a drastic surge from the more routine ambient summer heat, which was estimated to be around 80 degrees in the store, even with the fryers running all day. But on June 27, when temperature highs in Portland would eventually reach a record-breaking 112 degrees, it reached more than 100 degrees inside Voodoo Doughnut. Workers went to management and suggested that they close the shop early for their safety. After their demand was waved off, a group of employees walked out and went on strike through Monday, when the city’s temperatures soared even further to 115 degrees. 

“We would rather walk out on strike than to see a coworker collapse and hurt themselves or suffer heat stroke or worst case scenario, you collapse while you’re over a fryer,” said Samantha Bryce, a Voodoo Doughnut employee in Portland, who participated in a strike with her colleagues over workplace safety in June. “We don’t want someone to get hurt before the company takes action.”

By Brian Edwards and Jacob Margolis - LAist, August 25, 2021

In the summer of 2005, a terrible three-week heat wave swept through the West, driving temperatures to scorching triple-digit levels.

Four farmworkers working the fields of central California died.

The state quickly put emergency orders in place that evolved into the first workplace heat standard in the nation: Employers would have to give employees water, rest and shade as they toiled in high temperatures. Until then, there were no rules when it came to hot weather and the workplace.

Since then, California has seen hotter average temperatures in 12 of the past 16 years. Even as the climate emergency has grown more acute, the state’s once-groundbreaking heat-safety rules have not kept pace.

Public health experts and federal workplace regulators consider heat-related illness and death to be 100% preventable, they say. But California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health — Cal/OSHA, the agency that enforces the heat standard — has been chronically underfunded and understaffed. The result, according to dozens of interviews, a review of government records and an analysis of worker heat death cases: Farmworkers, firefighters, construction workers and others required to work in hot environments continue to die.

The state’s failure to adequately invest in Cal/OSHA has undercut the agency’s ability to crack down on companies that violate the heat standard. Its most recent budget request admitted as much, describing enforcement as “minimal to non-existent due to the lack of occupational health inspectors.” Rising temperatures caused by climate change have compounded the problem.

Some say the standard is already obsolete.

By Elizabeth Perry - Work and Climate Change Report, August 25, 2021

Most Canadians experienced global heating directly this summer – and in British Columbia, the chief coroner attributed 570 of the 815 sudden deaths during the June extreme heat event to the record-breaking temperatures, as reported by the CBC. “July 2021 was Earth’s hottest month ever recorded, NOAA finds” (Washington Post, Aug. 13) states that the combined land and ocean-surface temperature in July was 1.67 degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th-century average, with North America 2.77 F above average. The IPCC Report released in August includes long-term temperature trends in its overview of the physical impacts of climate change, and makes dire forecasts for the future.

Health, earnings, and environmental justice

Two new medical articles on the theme of heat and health appeared in the prestigious journal The Lancet, and are summarized in “Extreme heat-caused deaths have jumped 74% in the last 30 years” in Axios in August.

Examining the economic impacts on workers, in mid-August the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) released Too hot to work: Assessing the Threats Climate Change Poses to Outdoor Workers. The UCS report is summarized in “If we ignore climate change, it will be hell on outdoor workers” in HuffPost, re-posted by the National Observer on August 24. One of its unique findings: a forecast that between now and 2065, (assuming no action to reduce global emissions), the exposure to hazardous levels of heat will quadruple, resulting in a potential loss of 10 percent or more of earnings annually for more than 7.1 million US workers. Economy-wide, this translates into up to $55.4 billion of earnings at risk annually. In Health Costs of Climate Change , published by the Canadian Institute for Climate Choices published in June 2021, the estimate for Canada was that the labour productivity impact of higher temperatures is projected as “a loss of 128 million work hours annually by the end of century—the equivalent of 62,000 full-time equivalent workers, at a cost of almost $15 billion.”

Too Hot to Work counts farm labourers and construction workers, but also truck drivers, delivery and postal workers, firefighters, police, and forestry workers as outdoor workers. Given that Black/African American and Hispanic/Latino workers disproportionately comprise many U.S. outdoor occupations, the report highlights the environmental justice aspects of extreme heat . This environmental justice aspect has been described anecdotally by many articles over the summer – notably, in the poignant text and photos of “Postcard From Thermal: Surviving the Climate Gap in Eastern Coachella Valley” (ProPublica, Aug. 17) , which contrasts the living conditions of the wealthy in California, living relatively unaffected, and the real suffering of the mainly immigrant workers who live close by and work on the farms and as service workers.

By Malachi Dray - Labor Notes, August 24, 2021

On August 7, Denver, Colorado—suffocated with smoke from the massive California wildfires—topped the chart of the world’s most polluted major cities.

The Air Quality Index (AQI) reading that day reached 179, in the unhealthy red zone of the Environmental Protection Agency's rating system. The concentration of fine particulate matter was 11 times the World Health Organization’s recommended maximum exposure level for pollutants. Not just wildfire smoke but also everyday consumer pollutants like shampoo residue, sunscreen particles, and auto emissions combined into a toxic brew of irritants that left many in the city feeling ill with headaches, or wheezy.

Delivering mail under these conditions was sickening, and certainly threatened long-term respiratory health consequences. Yet at our station, postal management made no mention of air quality during safety talks throughout the week. And when I looked for the basis for a grievance or some other action, there were almost no resources to speak of from either the national union or from management.

Postal management has an environmental policy which only specifies indoor air quality as part of its purview. This is a major omission for hundreds of thousands of letter carriers who work outside all day—but it’s part of a longstanding pattern of neglect for basic climate conditions on the part of management. It took decades for postal management to provide bottled water to the carrier workforce on a regular basis, and only since the 2010s has management faced citations from OSHA for indoor heat-related safety violations.