Summer is upon us, and with it come climate catastrophes. Heat indexes have broken records, reaching 120 degrees Fahrenheit in South Texas. Wildfires in Canada have turned the skies over New York City orange with smoke and ash. Melting snowpack in California has threatened more floods like those that inundated communities in the winter and spring. Disaster is the new normal.
Environmental Protection Agency/Public domain
Climate change and extreme temperatures put outdoor workers at risk. Heat exposure can affect their safety, productivity, and health.
It has become commonplace to say that the future is here—just unevenly distributed—as is the destruction. When the heat skyrockets, some people have air-conditioned homes and offices to retreat to, while others head outdoors to pick fruit, deliver packages, and maintain the electricity that powers that air-conditioning. Those who disproportionately suffer are the workers of color and immigrants, who come to the United States seeking safety and decent work and are repaid with brutal conditions on the front lines of a global crisis.
In Texas, two of those workers died in the extreme heat the very week I am writing these words: Eugene Gates Jr., a sixty-six-year-old mail carrier in the Lakewood area of Dallas, collapsed on his route on June 20; and Cory Foster, a thirty-five-year-old utility lineman, fell ill after a day of work in Marshall, where workers were attempting to restore electricity damaged by storms. He was found dead in his hotel room after reportedly traveling with other workers from West Virginia to assist with the repairs.
Despite these tragedies, Texas lawmakers have decided it’s a good time to override labor laws passed in some localities that guarantee minimum protections, such as water breaks and shade, for workers who labor outdoors in the extreme heat. There are no national heat standards for workers, and Texas state lawmakers are free to preempt local laws, leaving workers—particularly those who might be vulnerable due to their precarious immigration status—stuck between risking their health at work and running out of money to keep their own air-conditioning on, if they should be lucky enough to have it.
According to NPR and Columbia Journalism Investigations, at least 384 workers have died from heat exposure in the last decade, but the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration keeps such poor records on heat fatalities that it is impossible to know the precise number. And things will only get worse.
The reality is that the United States relies on immigrant workers, even as another wave of far-right politicians demonizes them.
Meanwhile, the floods have left farms—and farmworkers—underwater, both literally and economically. With work halted due to the rising waters, “Workers in California who grow and pick the majority of fruits and nuts in the United States are experiencing an acute crisis of un- and under-employment, and ensuing food insecurity,” Leanna First-Arai at Truthout writes.
Julia Huerta, a farmworker and single mother of four in Oxnard, California, told Truthout that she made $200 a week in December, far too little to cover her $2,000 monthly rent. “It’s really difficult to support my kids right now,” she said. When First-Arai asked what type of support she wanted to see from elected officials, the first thing on Huerta’s list—before money or food—was “migration reform.” Undocumented workers are ineligible for most disaster aid or unemployment insurance.
The reality is that the United States relies on immigrant workers, even as another wave of far-right politicians demonizes them. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that half of the 2.5 million farmhands in the country are undocumented immigrants, while growers and labor contractors say the number is closer to 75 percent, according to The Guardian. Some 30 percent of construction workers are immigrants, and NBC News recently reported that decreased immigration—most recently due to Trump Administration policies, though many of those have not been overturned by the Biden Administration or were holdovers from previous eras—is slowing the production of much-needed new housing.
In Florida, where Republican Governor Ron DeSantis is building a presidential campaign based on racist, xenophobic, queerphobic, and transphobic policies, the governor’s latest signature policy is a bill that “limits social services for undocumented immigrants, allocates millions more tax dollars to expand DeSantis’s migrant relocation program, invalidates driver’s licenses issued to undocumented people by other states, and requires hospitals that get Medicaid dollars to ask for a patient’s immigration status,” according to NPR.
Even state representatives who voted for the bill seem to be backpedaling on it, or at least sending mixed messages. At an event in June, state Representative Rick Roth told an audience, “This bill is 100 percent supposed to scare you. I’m a farmer, and the farmers are mad as hell. We are losing employees. They’re already starting to move to Georgia and other states. It’s urgent that you talk to all your people and convince them that you have resources, state representatives, and other people that can explain the bill to you.” He added that the new legislation was “more of a political bill than it is policy.”
Scared and compliant workers don’t raise a fuss or complain about dangerous working conditions, whether it’s the heat, airborne ash, flooding, or the lack of basic protective equipment.
The strikes and protests that have taken place against the bill may have scared Florida farmers and politicians into admitting a fundamental truth about the U.S. immigration regime: It is not designed to entirely prevent workers from entering the country, but rather to keep them scared and compliant when they do. Scared and compliant workers don’t raise a fuss or complain about dangerous working conditions, whether it’s the heat, airborne ash, flooding, or the lack of basic protective equipment. They just shut up and do the job they are paid to do.
That’s why Huerta listed migration reform before food when asked what she wanted; given a less precarious status, it would be easier for workers to make the other demands of bosses and state lawmakers. These laborers live and work in a sort of legal limbo that leaves them completely exploitable, which is the subtext of every article explaining that a lack of immigrant workers causes home construction prices to rise.
Immigrant labor is cheap because immigrant workers’ lives have been treated as cheap, both back home and once they land in the United States. People leave countries across Central and South America “trying to escape a hell that the United States has helped to create,” The Guardian’s Julian Borger noted. As sociologist Christy Thornton explained to Borger, “The destabilization in the 1980s—which was very much part of the U.S. Cold War effort—was incredibly important in creating the kind of political and economic conditions that exist in those countries today.” The anti-communist foreign policy the United States aggressively pursued in Latin America has helped maintain a steady reserve of workers without rights flowing into the country that helped wreck their own.
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Farmworkers in California’s San Joaquin Valley weed crops by hand.
Climate chaos will only displace more people. In yet another brutal feedback loop, the workers who clean up after climate disasters—the “second responders,” as a report from the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON) refers to them—are often undocumented migrants. Some of them have already been displaced by climate change and then have to put their safety on the line again in the heat, fires, and floods.
Given all of these conditions, it’s worth highlighting a policy the Biden Administration announced with little fanfare earlier this year that expanded protections for undocumented workers who report labor violations—essentially allowing them protection from being detained or deported if they blow the whistle on a bad boss. “This is a pathway for workers to have a very official shield from the federal government,” Cal Soto of NDLON explains. “You can’t take away the retaliation and these bad actors, but it shields [undocumented workers] from the potential disastrous consequences of being reported to the police or immigration [authorities] just because you don’t have documents.”
The policy offers workers who have been abandoned so many times concrete benefits for coming forward about their working conditions. It also provides added protection for workers who might want to organize.
“It flips the enforcement structure on its head, where it’s really been employer-focused and sanction-focused,” Soto says.
Climate chaos will only displace more people.
Workers, under the policy, gain immediate protection, including, importantly, a work permit that allows them to leave abusive employers and seek jobs elsewhere. It also permits workers in states like Florida and Texas to file complaints with federal agencies, going over the heads of state and local officials.
Such a policy isn’t the full immigration reform that would put workers like Huerta on an even playing field with those of us born in the United States. It is the least this country can do for people who have been displaced, abandoned, exploited, and scapegoated countless times. But it is something to build upon as we look forward to a future of climate chaos.