green unionism

By Teniope Adewumi-Gunn and Juanita Constible - Natural Resources Defense Council, August 2022

We are in the midst of a profound public health crisis. Rising temperatures fueled by climate change are contributing to more extreme weather events, spikes in air pollution, more frequent wildfires, and increases in tick- and mosquito-borne disease outbreaks. The resulting health harms fall more heavily on some populations than others, including workers. Workers face a range of climate-related hazards on the job, but one of the most pressing and well-understood hazards is extreme heat.

Extreme heat is killing and sickening workers. Both short stretches of extreme heat and chronic exposure to heat can cause significant effects on their physical, mental, and social well-being. Heat can cause rash, cramps, exhaustion, and stroke, the most serious heat-related illness. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Survey of Occupational Injuries and Illnesses (SOII) estimates that from 1992 to 2019, more than 900 workers died and tens of thousands more were sickened due to extreme heat.

However, these numbers greatly underestimate the scale of the problem due to lack of reporting by negligent employers and by workers afraid of retaliation (e.g., loss of employment or deportation if they are undocumented). These numbers are further deflated when heat is not identified as a cause of, or contributor to, illness or injury. Negative outcomes from cardiac or respiratory illnesses are often not attributed to heat, even if that is an underlying cause. Physical and mental effects of heat such as disorientation can also increase the risk of other work- related injuries including falling from heights, being struck by a moving vehicle, or mishandling dangerous machinery. Research has shown that the number of workers facing health outcomes from extreme heat are higher than those reported by the BLS SOII. In fact, in California alone, a study of workers found more than 15,000 occupational heat-related illness cases from 2000 to 2017. The California cases were three to six times higher annually than the numbers reported for California by BLS.

Exposure to extreme heat impacts both indoor and outdoor workers. From agricultural and construction workers, who have the highest incidences of heat-related illnesses, to warehouse and other indoor employees working without adequate cooling or ventilation, heat touches many workplaces. Workers of color also experience greater rates of heat-related illnesses and fatalities than do white workers. Workers of color are overrepresented in industries with a high risk of heat illness, but racial disparities in heat illness and death also exist among those working the same jobs. Additionally, not all workers tolerate heat the same way. Those with personal risk factors such as heart disease, medications, and pregnancy are more likely to experience heat stress.

Download a copy of this publication here (PDF).

By staff - Labor Network for Sustainability, August 2022

“Young Workers Are Bridging the Climate and Labor Movements” – that’s the title of an article by journalist Leanna First-Arai that just appeared in Teen Vogue and Truthout. It features the Labor Network for Sustainability’s Young Workers Listening Project.

The article reports that the LNS Young Workers Listening Project is analyzing 400 surveys and 70 in-depth interviews with young workers exploring “young people’s experiences dealing with the impacts of climate change on the job” and their opinion on “how the labor and climate movements could further strengthen one another.”

Joshua Dedmond, youth organizer with the Labor Network for Sustainability (LNS), told First-Arai that, based on preliminary survey results, “There is a sincere yearning” by young workers to “bridge these existing chasms between the labor movement and climate justice movement.”

Dedmond said, “Younger workers are quicker to see the connections between intersecting crises they’re dealing with.” They bring “a refreshing analysis” that “we don’t have to trade off good jobs for the environment and we don’t have to trade off the environment for good jobs — we can very much work in concert.”

Young people in the labor movement, he added, “want to bargain on climate issues in contract negotiations.”

First-Arai reports that, “The Labor Network for Sustainability is in the midst of planning a September Young Workers Climate Convergence in Los Angeles,”… “where they’ll bring together workers across professions who want labor to lead on climate.”

By staff - Blue Green Alliance, August 2022

A new analysis commissioned by the BlueGreen Alliance from the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst finds that the more than 100 climate, energy, and environmental investments in the Inflation Reduction Act will create more than 9 million good jobs over the next decade—an average of nearly 1 million jobs each year.^1,2 That includes more than 6 million jobs created over the next 10 years by grants, loans, and tax credits and nearly 3 million jobs stimulated by new loan guarantee authority for the U.S. Department of Energy. The bill’s broad investments will also help sustain the millions of existing jobs in the clean economy. 

Few pieces of legislation this century have come close to such sweeping potential for good job creation. With robust application of the bill’s strong labor standards, many of these jobs in growing sectors like clean energy, clean manufacturing, and efficient buildings will offer workers good wages and benefits. To advance economic and racial justice, registered apprenticeship programs, targeted investments, and equitable hiring practices should be used to prioritize job access for low-income workers, workers of color, and workers in environmental justice, deindustrialized, and energy transition communities. 

In short, the bill’s unprecedented investments offer an unparalleled opportunity for workers and communities to capture the economic gains of the growing clean economy. Below is a synopsis of some of the jobs that the Inflation Reduction Act will create.

By Joe Allen - Tempest, July 28, 2022

When Esteban Chavez collapsed after making his last package delivery for the day in Pasadena, California on June 25, it was another twenty minutes before someone discovered him and called for emergency help. He died soon afterward. Esteban was 24 years old and had been working at United Parcel Service (UPS) for four years. It was his second day back to work after recovering from a shoulder injury.

Esteban went to work that day not expecting to die on the job. Temperatures, however, soared into the upper nineties in Pasadena, and UPS package delivery cars do not have air conditioning. “It hurts, it’s a pain that’s never gonna go away. And that’s something I wish on nobody, having the experience of losing your child,” his father Esteban, Sr. told the local ABC news affiliate. While the Los Angeles Medical Examiner-Coroner’s office hasn’t released an official cause of death, Esteban’s family believes with good reason that it is directly related to high temperatures and dehydration. “I’m thinking it’s heatstroke, but that’s just me,” Esteban’s aunt, Gloria Chavez, told ABC. Esteban’s father hopes that his son’s death “could bring awareness to his line of work, to the other drivers out there, just making sure you’re staying hydrated.”

Less than two weeks later in Scottsdale, Arizona the security camera of a homeowner captured a UPS driver collapsing on his front porch in 113-degree heat. Business Insider reported:

The homeowner, Brian Enriquez, captured the incident on video via his Ring doorbell on Thursday. He told local news that by the time he saw the video of the delivery man it was too late to provide any help, but he checked in with the company and reported the incident to local police for a welfare check.

The video shows the UPS driver struggling to walk to the customer’s front door while delivering an envelope. The driver then collapses in front of the door after he sets down the delivery, eventually falling onto his back. After a few moments, the delivery man stands up, rings the doorbell, and slowly walks back to his vehicle.

There has been a longstanding awareness about the dangers of heat in the workplace whether it be in vast agricultural fields, underfunded public schools, construction and road work, warehouses and factories, and for package delivery drivers. Climate change has accelerated the dangers for these workers.

When a local ABC News affiliate was able to track down the driver who collapsed on the Scottsdale porch—he was interviewed anonymously—and he told reporters:

(The) fact of the matter is that no amount of training can prepare your body for 160 degrees, 10 to 12 hours a day, six days a week,” says one UPS driver who spoke with ABC15 anonymously, saying the way they’re treated is inhumane.

It’s not just him. The driver described apocalyptic conditions, “Every week drivers are dropping like flies due to heat conditions and UPS is killing drivers because of this.”

His problems don’t stop at the end of the long workday:

There’s been several times where I’ve woken up in the middle of the night, cramping up, my legs cramping, my hand is cramping. I’m telling my wife I can’t sleep because I’m having these issues and I end up having to call out the next day because it’s clearly not safe for me to come back to work. And UPS will reprimand me.

UPS drivers and Teamsters’ spouses took to social media to highlight the lack of air conditioning, which most people found shocking. UPS driver Aiden Mann’s Tik-Tok post has garnered over five million views, while Theresa Klenk’s change.org petition demanding air conditioning for all UPS drivers has been signed by over 1.3 million people. Klenk and her UPS driver husband were featured in an NBC News expose of UPS three years ago about the risk for heat-related illness and death on the job.

By staff - Land Workers' Alliance, July 27, 2022

The Landworkers’ Alliance wishes to send a message of solidarity to the 40,000 members of the Union of Rail, Maritime, and Transport (RMT) taking strike action today.

The workers taking this action include guards, signallers, maintenance and catering staff who are striking against a multipronged attack on their working conditions by Network Rail and the 14 Train Operating Companies. These including proposed £2bn of cuts to the rail system which will result in 2,500 fewer maintenance staff and 625,000 fewer hours of maintenance, the closure of 1,000 ticket offices, and an 8% pay rise over two years at a time when the RPI rate of inflation is already running at 11.4%. The RMT is striking against policies that threaten to make the railways less safe and less viable as a system of transport, when the extreme heatwaves of last week have foregrounded the necessity of transitioning to a transport system based on public provision rather than private vehicles.

This comes as likely Prime Minister-to-be Liz Truss pledges to restrict the fundamental right of rail workers to strike, and the introduction of new legislation that will allow companies to hire agency workers to replace strikers. These proposals will make it harder for everyone to defend themselves from companies who care more about their rates of profit than their workers and the people using their service.

These cuts also come shortly after the Train Operating Companies turned a £600m profit. In 2020, the Rolling Stock Companies, who own the trains, paid out almost £1bn in dividends to their shareholders. We recognise the similarities between the relationship that the Train Operating Companies have with the rail system and its workforce to the relationship that industrial agribusiness has with the food system. It is an extractive relationship that seeks to take as much value out of the system as possible, with little care for the damage that this practice does to the railways and the people that work them.

As a union of landworkers, peasants and small farmers, we try to place ourselves in the traditions of the wider labour movement. The Tolpuddle Martyrs, who were famously deported to Australia in 1834 for breaking the Combination Laws that prevented workers from forming trade unions, were agricultural workers themselves. We also recognise the essential role that the fight for better wages and working conditions plays in the struggle for a better food system. For too long cheap, mass- produced food has been used by successive government as an alternative to social policies that would increase incomes for working people. Only through the maintenance of an industrial food system, whose true costs of environmental destruction and superexploitation of agricultural workers are not reflected in their price at the supermarket, can a system that continually seeks to reduce wages sustain itself.

In light of this, we encourage our members to attend the RMT’s picket lines at their local stations. You can find details of the locations and times of these picket lines on the RMT’s website. If you can make it to a picket line, we encourage you to wear LWA merch and bring LWA banners to show our solidarity, and to share your photos on social media by tagging @LandworkersUK on Twitter, or @landworkersalliance on Instagram.

By Gabriela Calugay-Casuga - Rabble, July 25, 2022

As summers are getting hotter around the world, workers are at risk. After the UK hit record temperatures the week of July 19, Canada’s Atlantic provinces are now under a heat warning along with Southern Ontario and parts of Quebec, according to the public weather alerts from Environment Canada.

Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) put out a statement urging members to be prepared to work in the heat. 

“Summer is late this year. With a few exceptions across the country, where they have experienced brief periods of heat, the hot weather is overdue,” CUPW said in their statement. “However, we must not regard this situation as the norm and disregard the eventual heat waves that will inevitably occur in the weeks to come.”

Heat events have been devastating for some communities. In the 80s, Unifor lost a member to heat stress. Sari Sairanen, Unifor’s director of the Health, Safety and Environment Department, said that although it has been decades, tragedies such as this remain in the collective memory and impact how unions approach emergency preparedness plans amidst rising temperatures.

According to the website for the Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety (CCOHS), there is no legislation that lays out a maximum temperature that workers can be exposed to at work. They said that exposure limits are influenced not only by temperature but also by relative humidity, exposure to sun or other heat sources, amount of air movement, how physically demanding the work is, how acclimatized the worker is to their workload, what clothing is worn (including protective clothing) and the work-rest regimen. 

CUPW laid out some precautions that workers can take to keep safe in the hot weather. These precautions include taking all the breaks that workers are provided and slowing down to avoid overworking in the heat. 

By staff - Trades Union Congress, July 25, 2022

Executive summary

Publicly-owned energy retail companies can deliver fairer bills for households, accelerate the rollout of household retrofits and reduce energy use.

Soaring energy bills are causing untold suffering for low-income households and workers across the UK. The “typical” bill was increased by 54% with Ofgem’s April increase in the energy price cap.[1] Many households have already seen bills go up by over a thousand pounds. Ofgem is expected to increase the electricity and gas price cap again in August by a further 51%, so that average bills pass £3,200.[2]

But allocating the burden of the gas price crisis to domestic households at this scale is not inevitable. Other European countries have demonstrated that it is possible to insulate many or all households from the fallout of the invasion of Ukraine, Putin’s gas politics and global volatility in terms of energy bills. Our analysis shows that this is because governments in those countries have more levers to intervene in energy pricing – and are more prepared to use the levers that they have. Part of this comes down to questions of who owns and controls our energy system, and whom it serves.

There is widespread recognition that the UK’s energy system is broken.

By Julia Rock and David Sirota - The Lever, July 25, 2022

President Joe Biden’s surrender on climate policy amid the intensifying crisis has prompted his own agency experts to sound a rare public alarm about their boss’s retreat, according to a letter being circulated throughout the administration and Capitol Hill.

The letter to Biden and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) — provided to The Lever by a House Democratic staffer — is initialed by 165 staffers at federal health and environmental agencies and at 75 congressional offices. They are demanding the president use more aggressive tactics to pass his long-promised climate agenda through the Senate.

“President Biden, you have an exigent responsibility to reduce suffering all over the world, and the power and skills to do so, but time is running out,” says the letter, which is now being circulated throughout the administration for more signatures. “You are the president of the United States of America at a pivotal moment in the history of the world. All that we ask is that you do everything in your power. We’ve done our part. We implore you to do yours.”

The letter was provided to The Lever by Saul Levin, a House Democratic staffer and coordinator of the Congressional Progressive Staff Association Climate Working Group. The officials signed the letter anonymously with their initials, to protect against political retribution. Another House Democratic staffer confirmed that the letter was being circulated to government officials for their signatures.

“Our house is on fire, and Manchin burned the stairs. Democratic leaders are walking away,” Levin told The Lever. “We cannot. We must test the fire escape, find the fire extinguisher, tie some sheets together if we have to: Our lives depend on it.”