construction workers

By Siri Chilukuri - Grist, July 25, 2023

Climate change is creating dangerously hot conditions for construction workers, mail carriers, delivery drivers, airline workers, farmworkers, and more. Conditions that were previously uncomfortable are now unbearable, and the failure of companies — along with some state governments — to catch up to the new normal of heat has had deadly consequences. 

U.S. heat-related fatalities have increased in recent years, according to an NPR analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data that found the three-year average of worker heat deaths has doubled since the early 1990s. In the decade spanning 2011 to 2021, heat killed more than 436 people on the job. 

The myriad of factors that influence how heat is actually felt can be difficult to pin down, but a metric known as the heat index — which combines temperature and humidity — can get close. Last week’s heat index figures were eye-popping, reaching 119 degrees Fahrenheit in Corpus Christi, Texas, and 113 F in both Phoenix and Baton Rouge, Louisiana. 

“The heat index is what really worries me,” said Tevita ’Uhatafe, a former airlines-operation worker who’s now the vice president of the Texas chapter of the AFL-CIO union. “Because that’s what we’re actually dealing with when we’re working outside.” 

Airline-operations positions often mean working outdoors with limited shade. Plus, being surrounded by the sheet metal of airplanes and the concrete of the tarmac can make it even hotter during periods of extreme heat. Concrete, for example, can actually contribute to rising temperatures. 

By mid-century, a quarter of Americans will experience heat index temperatures above 125 F for at least one day a year, according to a statistical model by the nonprofit First Street Foundation. Areas surrounding the Texas-Mexico border will experience temperatures above 100 F for more than a third of the year. In addition, researchers from the Union of Concerned Scientists and the University of California Merced found that outdoor workers stand to lose more than $39.3 billion in income annually by the middle of the century from reduced hours due to heat risk. 

By Barbara Barrett - Stateline, June 30, 2023

Nearly 400 U.S. workers died of heat exposure over a decade.

Even as summer temperatures soar and states wrangle with protecting outdoor workers from extreme heat, Texas last week enacted a law that axes city rules mandating water and shade breaks for construction workers.

In state after state, lawmakers and regulators have in recent years declined to require companies to offer their outdoor laborers rest breaks with shade and water. In some cases, legislation failed to gain traction. In others, state regulators decided against action or have taken years to write and release rules.

Heat causes more deaths in the United States each year than any other extreme weather. And in Texas, at least 42 workers died of heat exposure between 2011 and 2021, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, though labor advocates say the number is much higher because other causes are cited in many deaths.

A 2021 investigation by NPR and Columbia Journalism Investigations found nearly 400 workers had died of environmental heat exposure in the previous decade, with Hispanic workers — who make up much of the nation’s farm and construction workforce — disproportionately affected.

Climate change has brought more days of extreme heat each year on average, and scientists say that number will grow. Yet only three states — California, Oregon and Washington — require heat breaks for outdoor workers. Minnesota has a rule that sets standards for indoor workers, and Colorado’s heat regulations cover only farmworkers.

By Brooklyn Fox and Sarah Lehman - California State Lands Commission, June 16, 2023

The purpose of this Assembly Bill (AB) 525 Workforce Development Readiness Plan is to provide recommendations for workforce development efforts ahead of the necessary seaport investments and activities identified in the AB 525 Port Readiness Plan.

The workforce development readiness plan was developed considering the workforce required in California to deliver 25 GW of offshore wind power generation capacity by year 2045.This assessment includes the potential direct workforce required for the delivery of offshore wind projects, the workforce required for related port infrastructure upgrades as outlined in the AB 525 Port Readiness Plan, and the workforce requirement related to transmission network upgrades.

The workforce development assessment consists of three discrete pieces: (1) a needs assessment that analyzed the scale, timing and necessary skills of the required workforce; (2) an assessment of the currently available workforce and training infrastructure in California to support the growth of the offshore wind industry; and (3) a gap and opportunity analysis between the needs and availability assessments.

For more details, see: AB 525 Reports: Offshore Renewable Energy

Download a copy of this publication here (PDF).

By Michael Levien - Historical Materialism, March 2023

Review of Matthew Huber, (2022) Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet, London: Verso.

The year-long American saga that culminated in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) underscored the difference between two ways of mitigating climate change at the national level. The first is elite climate policy in which wonks and technocrats come up with the smartest policies to incentivise private capital to invest in the right technologies. This is, ultimately, what we got with the IRA, which has been accurately characterised as the triumph of ‘green industrial policy’.¹ The second is popular climate politics which seeks to build a broad political coalition for decarbonisation by tying it to social programmes that directly improve people’s lives. This is the idea behind the Green New Deal, which to a surprising extent made its way into the initial Build Back Better bill before Joe Manchin got his hands on it. Matthew Huber’s book Climate Change as Class War provides a powerful critique of the first while advancing a labour-centred version of the second.

Huber lands many good punches against what he calls professional-class climate politics. Building on the Ehrenreichs’ concept of the professional managerial class (PMC),² Huber argues that PMC climate politics characteristically over-emphasises that class’ stock-in-trade: education and credentials. In their hands, climate politics thus becomes a matter of knowledge (communicating the science) more than one of power (tackling the class power of the fossil-fuel industry). PMC policy technocrats further internalise neoliberal logic with their obsession with pricing carbon – a policy that ultimately balances the carbon budget on the backs of working-class consumers. In its more radical manifestations, PMC environmentalism – degrowth being the main target here – espouses an ascetic ‘politics of less’ that has no resonance with working-class people who already do not have enough. This type of environmental politics, Huber argues, explains why the right has been able to mobilise the working class against the environment.

By way of alternative, Huber advances a theory of working-class climate politics which he dubs ‘proletarian ecology’. The starting point, developed over Chapters 1 and 2, is to recognise that industrial fossil capital is responsible for the vast majority of emissions. As Huber sketches with discussions of the cement and fertiliser industries – for the latter, Huber draws on some interviews with managers of a fertiliser plant in Louisiana – their carbon intensity is not a matter of greed but of the structural imperative to produce surplus value, and therefore will not be halted (as opposed to greenwashed) by any amount of shaming. Thus, ‘Climate change requires an antagonistic approach towards owners of capital in the “hidden abode” of production’ (p. 106). The problem is that ‘the climate movement today – made up of professional class activists and the most marginalized victims of climate change – is too narrowly constructed to constitute a real threat to the power of industrial capital’ (p. 69).

This brings us to the bold and controversial claim of Climate Change as Class War: it is the working class (and organised labour in particular) that must be the main agent of radical climate politics, not the diverse coalitions of ‘marginalised groups’ – which includes Indigenous movements against pipelines and Black-led environmental justice organisations – who are currently the vanguard of the climate justice movement. What Huber calls ‘livelihood environmentalism’ only sees the working class as having environmental interests when their communities’ land, water or health are directly threatened (p. 195). Huber’s theory of proletarian ecology, by contrast, proceeds from the broader recognition that ‘a defining feature of working-class life under capitalism is profound alienation from the ecological conditions of life itself’ (p. 188). Thus ‘a working-class interest in ecology will emerge not from the experience of environmental threats, but from a profound separation from nature and the means of subsistence’ (pp. 181–2). Rather than defending bodies or landscapes, it will focus on the working class’s material interest in decommodifying the means of subsistence (p. 196).

By Beli Acharya, Andreas Cluver, Bill Whitney, and Danny Bernardini - Construction Trades Workforce Initiative (CTWI), January 12, 2023

Alameda, Contra Costa and Napa-Solano Building & Construction Trades Councils (BTC) and Construction Trades Workforce Initiative (CTWI) respectfully submits our comments in response to the California Energy Commission (CEC) Equitable Building Decarbonization Program Request for Information (RFI).

CTWI is the nonprofit partner of the East Bay Building Trades, working to ensure the long term sustainability of the construction industry by bridging the gap between union construction labor and key stakeholders. The three BTC’s together represent a coalition of over 30 affiliated unions representing workers in various construction trades throughout the East Bay. Together, CTWI and the three BTC’s act as the collective voice of construction trade labor.

We support equitable efforts toward decarbonization and climate sustainability, and we believe the California Energy Commission (CEC) initiative to develop and implement an Equitable Building Decarbonization Program is a great opportunity to advance these shared goals. We appreciate the opportunity to submit comments for consideration.

It is important that equity be considered for all stakeholders involved in the program. We believe that decarbonization work and climate sustainability can be achieved in a manner that allows for everyone to be better off and collectively prosper. There is a clear emphasis in the program on equity for low-to-moderate-income residents and ensuring that the program is accessible to these residents. There must also be a clear emphasis on equity for the low-to-moderate-income workers who will be performing the work and labor involved in the program. The jobs created and utilized by the program should be quality, high road jobs available to local and disadvantaged residents.

By David Griscom and Matt Lech - Left Reckoning, November, 17, 2022

By staff - Trades Union Congress, July 7, 2022

• Funding already allocated covers just 3% of retrofits needed by schools, as energy bills rise by 93%
• Unions hit back at government suggestions that existing funding for retrofits will be cut
• It is “irresponsible” not to use existing technology so that schools will have more money for education and lower emissions, says TUC

Making UK school buildings energy efficient and fit for the future is a win-win, according to a new report published today (Thursday) by the TUC.

The report looks at the current spending on schools through the Public Sector Decarbonisation Scheme (PSDS), and estimates how much more investment is needed.

Compiled by x344543 - IWW Environmental Unionism Caucus, January 26, 2015

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’s.

The following news items feature issues, discussions, campaigns, or information potentially relevant to green unionists:

Lead Stories:

• The Agents of Unregulated Globalization vs. the Agents of the Fight against Climate Change - By Jeanette Bonifaz, Center for Economic and Policy Research, January 9, 2015

Crude by Rail:

• CSX reports record fourth quarter results - Trains [paywall alert], January 21, 2015
• Federal Court Order: Explosive DOT-111 "Bomb Train" Oil Tank Cars Can Continue to Roll - By Steve Horn, DeSmog Blog, January 23, 2015
• Interim Settlement Reached in Lac Megantic Oil Train Disaster, but Culprits Say "It Wasn't Us" - By Roger Annis, Truthout, January 22, 2015

Carbon Bubble:

• Alberta One Of Hardest Hit By Lower Oil Prices - By Andy Tully, OilPrice.Com, January 20, 2015
• Baker Hughes to lay off 7,000 - By Jennifer Hiller, FuelFix, January 20, 2015
• BHP to cut 40 percent of its U.S. shale drilling - By Jennifer Hiller, FuelFix, January 21, 2015
• Halliburton suggests North American layoffs could come - By Jennifer Hiller, FuelFix, January 20, 2015

Green Jobs and Just Transition:

• A Boom in Solar Jobs - By Rick Cohen, Nonprofit Quarterly, January 22, 2015
• In US, There Are Twice as Many Solar Workers as Coal Miners - By Kirsten Korosec, Fortune, January 17, 2015

Other News of Interest:

• Brazilian Workers, Students Battle Fare Hikes Pushed By Workers Party - By Steve Payne, In These Times, January 22, 2015
• Building Bridges with MST - By La Via Campesina South Asia, La Via Campesina, January 20, 2015
• Elizabeth Mpofu speaks before 50,000 people at the “we are fed up” demonstration - La Via Campesina, January 21, 2015
• Kosovo miners return from underground, ending 3-day strike - By Andrew Topf, Mining.Com, January 26, 2015
• 150-foot span of Willits Bypass collapses into Haehl Creek; Several workers injured - By Adrian Baumann and Michael Mott, Willits News, January 22, 2015
• Oil And Gas Production Is Exposing Californians To At Least 15 Different Kinds Of Pollutants - By Katie Valentine, Think Progress, January 22, 2015
• Outside Senators’ Clean Water Act proposal threatens Bristol Bay salmon, culture, jobs - By Tim Bristol, Save Bristol Bay, January 22, 2015
• Report faults Chevron - By D Ross Cameron, Contra Costa Times, January 24, 2015
• Scientists and Doctors Sound Alarm Over Health Dangers of Oil Spill Dispersants - By Dahr Jamail, Truthout, January 20, 2015
• Stop the Free Trade Agreements [brochure] - La Via Campesina, January 20, 2015
• U.S. refinery workers, oil firms start talks for new contract - By Erwin Seba, Reuters, January 21, 2015
• Via Campesina solidarity visit to Douro small wine growers - By La Via Campesina News Team, La Via Campesina, January 20, 2015

For more green news, please visit our news feeds section on ecology.iww.org; Twitter #IWWEUC

From Revolution News - September 8, 2014

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’s.

A group of construction workers have launched a protest over poor labor conditions in Istanbul’s Halkalı neighborhood, halting their work and blocking a busy highway. Workers said many of them had health issues due to the inhumane working conditions. They also said they couldn’t receive wages regularly and added that their meal contained parasites and worms. The workers brandished signs and shouted slogans demanding the management’s resignation. Some angry laborers also set various construction materials on fire, partially blocking traffic in the outer western suburb. Riot police were deployed to the area as were firetrucks, which extinguished the blaze. The protests reportedly lasted for around three hours.<

The working conditions of construction workers in hundreds of job sites in Istanbul have come under the spotlight after the September 6 disaster that cost 10 workers their lives. Officials from the construction company responsible for the field, Torunlar, rejected all accusations and even placed blame on the workers, prompting further anger. Worker unions and critics have repeatedly stressed that most employees in Turkey were made to work and live under unhealthy conditions and that the government is most responsible for this.