America’s Doublethink on Working Through the Heat

It’s troublingly hot in June, which means the United States is entering the heat-death zone for workers again. We’ve been here before. In San Antonio, on a blisteringly hot June day in 2022, Gabriel Infante, a 24-year-old construction worker, died in his first week on the job, after he entered a state of delirium while laying fiber-optic cable; medics measured his temperature at 109.8 degrees Fahrenheit. That same month, Esteban Chavez Jr., also 24, died after passing out while delivering packages in Pasadena, California, in temperatures above 90 degrees.

Attributing a death to heat alone can take months of investigation; attributing a heat-related death to job conditions requires more work still. The tally of worker heat deaths that the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics gathers each year is fairly small, but on the rise. It is also, almost certainly, an undercount. A report from Public Citizen, a nonprofit consumer-advocacy organization, estimates that in the U.S., 2,000 workers die and 170,000 are injured by heat each year. Last summer, worker deaths included an employee at a grocery-store distribution center in Memphis whose colleagues said he was sweating and asking for water, a 66-year-old mail carrier on his route in Dallas, and a 26-year-old farmworker who collapsed on the job in Yuma, Arizona. This summer—perhaps even this current heat wave—will inevitably bring more.   

In the country each year, heat kills more people overall than do tornadoes, hurricanes, and floods combined—and heat deaths have been increasing over the past three decades. Heat is dangerous for the body, and it’s more dangerous when you’re exerting yourself—as millions do each day on the job. Yet few if any enforceable rules exist that could protect workers from what is becoming a widespread occupational hazard. The federal government sometimes issues citations to businesses when their workers die from heat, under its general duty to keep workplaces free from hazards, but at present, no federal regulations address heat specifically. The choice in a hotter world is clear: Either we do more to protect workers, or more workers die. But right now, the country is engaged in a line of doublethink, in which we act as if we have time to put in place these protections—or even roll them back—and yet expect the center to hold in the meantime.

Some movement may be on the horizon. Yesterday, California regulators voted to establish heat protections for indoor workers for the first time. And this summer, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration is expected to issue a proposal for long-awaited new rules aimed at protecting the roughly 50 million workers nationwide whose jobs put them at risk of heat illness and death. That proposal must still surmount the obstacles in its way. Some states have shown an interest in opposing such protections: Florida proactively passed legislation that would block any future local heat protections for workers, and Texas passed a law to eliminate the bare minimum form of protection, mandated water breaks for construction workers. (Business groups and lobbyists argue that heat-protection standards present an undue burden on employers.) Most states, though, simply have no laws on the books to address the risk of work-related heat illness.

So this summer, which is predicted to break heat records, and every one until federal or state governments change the rules, millions of people will be working outside in hot temperatures, or working indoors without proper cooling systems. (The deaths of postal and package-delivery workers, for example, may be connected to the heat levels in their trucks, which are not always air-conditioned.) And even on what now count as merely average summer days, the risk is higher than was previously understood. For instance, La Isla Network, an NGO that develops protocols for reducing occupational heat stress, partnered with university researchers to conduct a small pilot study in which construction workers in Kansas City swallowed pill-size devices to monitor their internal body temperature during three summer days. (They were building a data center.) The weather was warm, but moderately so—88 degrees on average. Yet the study found that the workers’ bodies were worryingly hot: 43 percent of them were essentially running a low-grade fever of 100.4.

Prolonged and chronic exposure to heat and dehydration can lead to systemic inflammation and organ damage, particularly stressing the kidneys and heart. The workers who manage to stay alive despite doing strenuous labor in high temperatures can suffer kidney injury and develop chronic kidney disease. The OSHA rule is expected to mandate providing drinking water and break areas at a specific heat-index threshold, likely 80 degrees, as well as monitoring for heat illness at a higher heat-index threshold, likely 90 degrees, which would take into account factors like humidity.

Although this would be a start, it would not truly protect workers, Jason Glaser, the CEO of La Isla Network, told me. The organization has found, primarily from researching sugarcane workers in Mesoamerica—where companies must maintain certain labor conditions to comply with trade deals and supply-chain regulations—that more strenuous work would need to be regulated at lower temperatures than other kinds of work, and that rules should take into account the ways the body responds to different parts of the day, Glaser said. Nor is it enough to protect people at the day’s scorching hottest: Breaks must happen early and often enough to account for the fact that after a certain amount of heating, the human body simply cannot cool down as effectively and ends up in an overheating feedback loop. Even the water breaks that Texas just legislated against aren’t enough to protect people: “You can be completely hydrated and still have heatstroke,” he told me.  

Right now, just five states have any language in their laws around heat protection for workers, and they represent a patchwork of approaches. Minnesota’s rule applies to indoor job sites, and Colorado’s heat standard covers agricultural workers. In California, where a large portion of the nation’s agricultural workers are located, the state rule for outdoor workers mandates access to shade at temperatures exceeding 80 degrees and a host of other measures at 95 degrees, but those are “dry bulb” temperatures—they do not factor in humidity, which can make seemingly milder temperatures more dangerous. Plus, the rule includes no specific guidelines on when, how long, or how frequent breaks must be when the temperature is under 95 degrees, or whether the workers must have access to cooling facilities. It mostly requires that workers be able to take breaks when they feel they need to—which is unlikely to be frequent enough to protect them if, say, they are paid for harvesting crops on a per-unit basis and have an economic incentive to work through early signs of heat illness, Glaser pointed out. (Above 95 degrees, the California rule mandates 10 minutes of rest for every two hours of work.) Plus, at a certain point, an individual is not likely to judge their danger accurately; a classic sign of occupational heatstroke is disorientation.

Ultimately, every workplace death or injury from heat is avoidable, and each one is the product of a lack of adequate safety measures. For instance, La Isla found that when sugarcane workers in Nicaragua were given shaded rest breaks more frequently and earlier in the day, along with proper hydration and sick days, their rates of kidney injury dropped from 27 percent over a single harvest season to 7 percent. (The organization also found that these protections increased productivity and revenue for the company involved.) In the U.S., in the absence of such protections, the cost of inaction is disproportionately borne by its lowest-paid workers. Hispanic farmworkers, who make up 47 percent of people working in U.S. agriculture, are the population most likely to die from extreme heat; farmworkers in general are 35 times more likely to die from heat-related stress than workers in other outdoor industries. Hispanic people also hold a third of all construction jobs in the country, a job category with 13 times the risk of heat death than other outdoor industries.

The economic consequences of this may be immense: A report from the Atlantic Council and the Adrienne Arsht–Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center found that, under current climate conditions, lost labor productivity due to heat in the U.S. could reach $100 billion a year. Barring major action to mitigate it, that loss could reach $200 billion by 2030 and $500 billion by 2050.

At the moment, several states including Nevada, Maryland, and New York are developing new standards or considering strengthening old ones. The news out of California today, granting indoor workers protections, is a significant step forward. How states and the federal government meet this superheated moment will be telling about who, exactly, the country is willing to sacrifice before facing the reality of the world we’ve made.