Heat Illness

At The New York Times, Elizabeth Olson writes about the challenges that older workers face in proving workplace bias. She begins the story with Donetta Raymond, a longtime manufacturing worker laid off, along with hundreds of others, by Spirit AeroSystems Holdings. Now, some of those workers are bringing a lawsuit after discovering that nearly half of the laid-off workers were 40 or older, the age when federal age discrimination protections kick in. Olson writes: Such lawsuits are popping up as the nation’s work force ages and as many longtime workers claim that they are being deliberately…

I spend most of my time these summer days in cool air-conditioned (AC) environments. I feel the 100 degree heat when I’m going from one AC-cooled building to another. For me, the intense central Texas heat is something that is “out there” not "in here." But I was reminded today of people whose jobs cause them to say “it’s an oven in there.” An acquaintance's husband works as an auto mechanic. The garage where he works normally has a couple of large fans to circulate the air. Today one of the fans broke down. Temperatures inside the garage matched the outdoor temperature of nearly 100 degrees…

The Pump Handle is on a holiday break. The following, which was originally published on May 23, is one of our favorite posts from 2016. by Kim Krisberg Last summer, 25-year-old Roendy Granillo died of heat stroke while he installed flooring in a house in Melissa, Texas, just north of Dallas. His tragic and entirely preventable death marked a turning point in advocacy efforts to pass a rest break ordinance for local construction workers. About five months after Granillo’s death, the Dallas City Council voted 10-5 to approve such an ordinance, which requires that construction workers be given a…

Last summer, 25-year-old Roendy Granillo died of heat stroke while he installed flooring in a house in Melissa, Texas, just north of Dallas. His tragic and entirely preventable death marked a turning point in advocacy efforts to pass a rest break ordinance for local construction workers. About five months after Granillo’s death, the Dallas City Council voted 10-5 to approve such an ordinance, which requires that construction workers be given a 10-minute rest break for every four hours of work. On its face, it seems like an incredibly simple and logical request, especially considering the…

A recent agreement between striking farmworkers and big agribusiness in Baja California could be the “most significant achievement by a farm labor movement in recent Mexican history,” reports Richard Marosi in the Los Angeles Times. Among the settlement details, daily wages for workers will go up by as much as 50 percent and workers will receive the required government benefits often denied by their employers. Marosi reports: “This is a watershed moment,” said Sara Lara, a farm labor researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. In decades of studying farm issues, Lara said she…

A hot work environment killed at least 13 people in 2012 and 2013 (not counting cases from nineteen states, including California, that operate their own OSHA programs). On The Pump Handle, Celeste Monforton writes "the report shows the diversity of jobs and situations in which workers are at risk of suffering a heat-related illness or death." Kim Krisberg says "most of the people worked outdoors, though seven of the cases happened indoors in work settings with a powerful heat source." Nine of the thirteen died during their first three days on the job, showing that the human body needs time to…

Today, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released new data on heat deaths among U.S. workers, underscoring the often-tragic consequences that result when employers fail to take relatively simple and low-cost preventive actions. Published in today’s issue of CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR), researchers reviewed two years worth of OSHA enforcement cases that were investigated under its general charge to uphold safe and healthy workplaces. (OSHA investigates workplace heat illness and death via the “general duty clause” of the Occupational Safety and Health Act of…