The Future of Work Is on Fire

Work futurists talk about work-from-home vs. return-to-office as if it's THE hot topic arising from climate change. Outdoor workers may beg to differ.

Migrant workers harvest lettuce in late August. Photo credit: U.S. Department of Agriculture

Peering through the smoke that Canadian wildfires blew my way last week, I noticed a pattern of colleagues’ social media updates like this:

Employers will face other crises, like the hazardous smoke in the northeast, linked to climate change that will force them into teleworking.

Seems likely.

Then I stumbled across a Bloomberg headline, “Wildfires Pose Workplace Conundrum: Stay Home or Come to the Office?”

Yeeeaaah, we might expect Bloomberg to pontificate about “coming” to the office. (I don’t come to the office. I go to the office.)

No doubt… corralling commuters through ash-laden smoke and into offices, to do the same work they could’ve done at home, deserves our attention.

But, short-term, smoky air isn’t the most dire consequence workers face as a result of climate change.

Workers Are Climate Canaries

The occupational risks of climate change are so alarming an American Journal of Public Health editorial dubbed workers “climate canaries,” explaining…

Exposures include temperature extremes, severe weather events, air pollution, weather-dependent infectious and zoonotic diseases, wild fires, and safety hazards... These have documented occupational mortality and morbidity, likely to increase in a changing climate… Vast numbers of workers potentially affected include those working in emergency response, construction, utility, demolition, clean-up, landscaping, agriculture, forestry, wildlife management, postal service and delivery, warehouse, heavy industry, and a number of manufacturing settings.¹

The Environmental Protection Agency details the perils climate change poses to worker health:

• Heat illness

• Respiratory illness

• Physical and mental injuries and disorders

• Insect- and tick-related disease

• Pesticide-related effects

These aren’t predictions. Injuries, illness, and deaths linked to climate change are happening today and are expected to increase as work environments deteriorate:

• A 2021 analysis found the three-year average of US worker heat deaths had doubled since the early 1990s.

• In the 1990s, experts in El Salvador identified a spike in agricultural workers’ death due to kidney failure. They attributed the wave of fatalities to heat stress and dehydration linked to hotter outdoor temperatures. Similar clusters ultimately were found in muggy agricultural regions of Central America, as well as South America, the Middle East, Africa, and India.²

  A Florida study revealed a 33% rate of acute kidney injury in farm workers,³ a phenomenon expected to worsen as climate change picks up steam.

• On average, crop pickers in the US spend 21 days working in unsafe heat each year. Unchecked, climate change is predicted to double their heat risk by the year 2050 and triple it by 2100.

• Workers of color⁴ are disproportionately exposed to hazardous levels of heat. A third of all occupational heat fatalities in the US, for example, occur among Hispanic workers, who make up only 17% of the workforce. Their disproportionate death toll is mostly attributable to overrepresentation in environmentally vulnerable industries, like construction and agriculture.

• Sadly, the risks to wildland firefighter life and limb are a foregone conclusion. Less well recognized, however, are substantial mental health hazards. Responding to a survey,⁵ wildland firefighters revealed mental ill-health at rates up to 10 times higher than the general population:

  • 17.3% reported symptoms of depression

  • 12.8% had symptoms of anxiety disorder

  • 20.1% said they experienced suicide ideation within the previous year

  • Nearly 14% had indications of PTSD

  • Half had recently engaged in binge drinking.

In the absence of improved mental health support, the risk to wildland firefighters is likely to grow as fire season gets longer (likely a consequence, at least partially, of climate change).

Oblivion or Denialism

Future-of-work prognosticators have little to say about climate change. They’re busy — when not talking about remote and hybrid work — gushing and/or sounding the alarm about AI and giving the occasional nod to DEI. Why pay attention to what the future holds for workers unlikely to click a Like or Subscribe button?

Climate change and employee wellbeing? Not mentioned once in descriptions of 9 Future of Work Conferences in 2023.

It’s an oblivion some might be tempted to characterize as denialism.

We can, of course, do more than one thing at a time: Advocate for 1) worker health and safety 2) climate action, and 3) flexibility to work from home. But let’s not leapfrog over the first two.

Action Items

Amid changing climate, the growing frequency and intensity of extreme heat events is increasing the dangers workers face, especially for workers of color who disproportionately work in essential jobs in tough conditions.

— Former US Department of Labor Secretary Marty Walsh

Excessive heat isn’t the sole occupational hazard magnified by climate change, but in the US there’s growing consensus for prioritizing enactment of a federal standard protecting workers (indoor as well as outdoor) from excessive heat.

An enforceable heat standard — requiring employers to provide training, acclimatization plans, hydration, shade, modified work-intensity, and cooling — can prevent at least 50,000 injuries and illnesses annually, according to advocacy group Public Citizen (see its report, The Demand For Immediate Worker Protections Increases As Dangerous Temperatures Rise).

The US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has proposed a heat standard, but it could take years to find its way through government red tape even if it managed to weather a potential political firestorm.

US residents who want to take action: Urge your national representatives to compel OSHA to enact an interim occupational heat standard.

US OSHA regulation isn’t the be-all-and-end-all. It won’t help workers in other countries and it won’t stop wildfires or other disasters. As one research team wrote:

As adaptation measures will not always be possible, and may create their own risks to outdoor workers, it is critical that ambitious mitigation measures also be taken to limit the rise of extreme heat.⁶

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Resources…

• Heat is killing workers in the U.S. — and there are no federal rules to protect them — Columbia Journalism Investigations and NPR

• Outdoor Workers Exposed to Wildfire Smoke — CDC

• Climate Change: Impact on Occupational Safety and Health — EU-OSHA

From Other Substackers…

Don't blame Canada — In Heated, one of the most popular climate substacks,

Arielle Samuelson

and

Emily Atkin

explore fossil fuel companies’ role in wildfires.

As Pay Issues Linger, Canadian Firefighters Start Refusing Work as Wildfires Burn — “You're next U.S. unless you do something,” writes

The Hotshot Wake Up

, a newsletter about wildfires, fire tech, and wildfire policy, published by a former hotshot (a highly skilled firefighter trained to work on the hottest sections of wild fires).

Will it be a record year for Canadian wildfires? How are they changing over time? — A refreshingly clear-eyed analysis by

Hannah Ritchie

in her brilliant newsletter, Sustainability by numbers.

We Can See Clearly Now: The Smoke Has Come — In The Crucial Years,

Bill McKibben

— without downplaying North American wildfires — reminds us that smoke is the norm for large segments of the global populations.

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Work Chronicles

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New York Times Gift Article

(no paywall through June 28, 2023)

The A.I. Revolution Will Change Work. Nobody Agrees How. “How many jobs will be ‘affected by’ world-changing technology is different depending on who you ask.” (June 10, 2023)

1. Roelofs, C., & Wegman, D. (2014). Workers: the Climate Canaries. American Journal of Public Health, 104(10), 1799.

2. Sorensen, C., & Garcia-Trabanino, R. (2019). A new era of climate medicine—addressing heat-triggered renal disease. New England Journal of Medicine, 381(8), 693-696.

3. Mix, J., Elon, L., Mac V, V. T., Flocks, J., Economos, E., Tovar-Aguilar, A. J., & McCauley, L. A. (2018). Hydration Status, Kidney Function, and Kidney Injury in Florida Agricultural Workers. Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, 60(5), e253-e260.

4. Gubernot, D. M., Anderson, G. B., & Hunting, K. L. (2015). Characterizing occupational heat‐related mortality in the United States, 2000–2010: An analysis using the census of fatal occupational injuries database. American journal of industrial medicine, 58(2), 203-211.

5. O'Brien, Patricia & Campbell, Duncan. (2021). Wildland Firefighter Psychological and Behavioral Health: Preliminary Data from a National Sample of Current and Former Wildland Firefighters in the United States [Conference session].

6. Licker, R., Dahl, K., & Abatzoglou, J. T. (2022). Quantifying the impact of future extreme heat on the outdoor work sector in the United States. Elem Sci Anth, 10(1), 00048.