Workers update

No federal standard protects workers from extreme heat, though OSHA proposed a rule in 2021—a half-century after public health officials first recommended precautionary measures. California was the first of the five states that have passed a heat exposure standard and its requirements are considered among the toughest. Yet the standard doesn’t recognize an increasingly dangerous threat for agricultural laborers in a warming world: working in hot, polluted air. According to the 2022 annual report from California OSHA, or Cal/OSHA, just two California farmworkers died from heat exposure between 2018 and 2022.  But an Inside Climate News review of federal farmworker death records, along with temperature and air pollution data, suggests the numbers may be much higher. Scores of farmworkers died in California between 2018 and 2022 when temperatures exceeded the threshold that triggers California’s heat safety requirements. All of these deaths occurred in counties with chronically unsafe air.  

The US economy added 216,000 jobs in December, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data released Friday, blowing past expectations and capping off a year of resilience in the labor market. The unemployment rate remained at 3.7%.