Many workers aren’t protected from deadly heat

Experts explain extreme heat’s impacts on workplace risks, marginalized communities, and the economy.

News stories of farmhands and other outdoor workers dying from heat-related impacts are stark reminders that few regulations exist to protect laborers from extreme heat.

“Lower-income populations… [find] themselves at the mercy of temperatures where even moderate physical exertion is lethal.”

The average number of days United States agricultural workers spend working in unsafe conditions will double by mid-century, and, without mitigation, triple by the end of the century, according to a 2020 study led by Michelle Tigchelaar, a research scientist at Stanford University’s Center for Ocean Solutions.

Here, Tigchelaar and Michele Barry, senior associate dean of global health, and Sam Heft-Neal, a research scholar at Stanford’s Center on Food Security and the Environment, dig into extreme heat’s effects:

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