Smoke, Heat, Storms: How Climate Change is Making Bad Working Conditions Even Worse
As wildfires, heat waves and hurricanes intensify, workers are increasingly fighting for basic protections on top of everything else.
Sarah Lazare
One morning, when Jacob started his 9 a.m. shift as a UPS driver in Minnesota, he noticed it was hazy outside. It was July 16, and wildfires raging across northeastern Minnesota and southern Canada had unleashed acrid, hazardous smoke across much of the state. The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency was urging people to stay indoors. But Jacob was expected to work an estimated 9- or 10-hour shift, getting in and out of his vehicle delivering packages.
Management hadn’t provided any protective measures, like masks, he says, and he was inhaling the toxic smoke for hours. “The worst part about driving and working outside is we don’t have air conditioning or anything,” he says over the phone. “On that day it was extremely hot as well as humid, so we drove with both doors open on the highway or just in our delivery area. We were exposed to the air.” (Jacob is a pseudonym, and we are not identifying his specific work location within Minnesota, to protect him from retaliation.)
Three hours into his shift, he felt a tightness in his chest. “I didn’t pay it no mind until I started to get light-headed,” he tells me. Determining it was unsafe to keep driving, Jacob sought medical attention. After hours of observation and tests, he was eventually cleared for release, but the experience left him unsettled. Wildfires are growing larger and more destructive due to human-made climate change. “It’s a little scary knowing that you’re breathing in toxic air and still needing to service your community, and that there isn’t anything in place that protects you or your wellbeing,” he says.
As climate change intensifies, worsening fires and extreme weather are creating increasingly hostile conditions for workers like Jacob. Alongside fighting for healthcare, wages and better treatment, these workers now find themselves fighting for protections from dangerous heat, smoke and storms — the severity of which is only expected to worsen if the status quo continues. Our warming planet, in other words, is defining the terrain in which workers must organize. “In Minnesota, every summer, we now experience wildfire smoke in these hot months,” says Scott Wilkie, the president of Teamsters Local 638, the union that represents Jacob. “It’s been more intense, especially in the northern parts of Minnesota,” he adds. “You’re dealing with heat, already tough working conditions and then, on top of that, now you’ve got an air quality index that’s at an unhealthy level.”
At the Affy Tapple food processing plant in Niles, Ill., workers describe sweltering indoor temperatures and cooling systems so insufficient that, during the summer, it’s often hotter inside than out. “If the temperature is 85 [degrees Fahrenheit] outside, I can bet the temperature inside is at least 95 [degrees],” one worker told me. Like many labor issues, workers say the heat is the result of a combination of factors, including management shortcomings. But they worry about what their workplace will be like as climate change intensifies.
Inside the factory, workers cook caramel and dip and prepare caramel apples on assembly lines, before they’re packed and sent out for delivery. During candy season, which starts in August and goes through the fall, up to 200 people work at the facility, many of them hired through temporary staffing agencies. Outside of this busy season, around 50 workers work at the facility, workers say.
Workers say their uniforms add to the discomfort of the heat. “We have to use plastic sleeves covering our entire arms,” a worker tells me. “The plastic sticks to our skin because of sweat, and it’s incredibly uncomfortable. It’s the same thing with the glove. You are sweating and can’t pull up your gloves comfortably because of the sweat.”
“I’m thirsty all the time but can’t leave the line and go get water,” a worker told me. “Maybe every hour you have a chance to get a drink.” Another worker put it this way: “I get tired very quickly. I’m sweating and want water. Your body gets exhausted.”
To protect them from retaliation, workers’ identities and jobs are anonymous. They don’t have a union, and heat, they say, is only one of several issues they face. Health insurance and pay are inadequate, they tell me, and they are concerned about preventable workplace injuries, including severe burns. “The focus is on the product,” one worker told me. “If the workers melt or the workers freeze, nobody gives a damn. The apples have to come out perfect.”
There is overwhelming evidence that rising temperatures increase heat-related illnesses among workers, especially those in fields like construction and agriculture. But rising temperatures also affect indoor workers, particularly those who face “confounding factors,” such as “heat from machinery and surroundings” and “wearing of personal protective equipment,” according to a 2025 report from the World Meteorological Organization and the World Health Organization. In 2023, heat contributed to about 28,000 workplace injuries in the United States, according to one estimate.
Workers depend on their employers to create hazard-free work environments. Affy Tapple is owned by private equity, an opaque industry associated with cost-cutting and poor labor conditions. Affy Tapple is owned by Beavers Holdings, which is owned by Pritzker Private Capital, which is private equity, according to Matt Parr, communications director for the Private Equity Stakeholder Project.
“It would not surprise me to see a correlation there between private equity ownership and poor working conditions,” Parr says. “It’s a scenario we’ve seen play out across different types of sectors with cost-cutting or laying workers off or not having good working conditions.” Affy Tapple did not respond to a request for comment submitted through a contact form on their website.
The same day Jacob, the UPS driver, was sickened by the smoke, his union, Teamsters Local 638, issued a statement declaring, “Our guidance to members at this time in simplest form is, take care of your health needs no matter what — especially if your employer won’t. Seek medical attention immediately if needed.”
Wildfire smoke is more dangerous than other forms of air pollution caused by traffic and agriculture, because wildfires burn far hotter, which means the fine particles they release “are much more chemically active and can be very, very toxic,” according to University of California – San Diego environmental epidemiologist Tarik Benmarhnia. A 2022 study looking at California’s wildfire seasons from 2004 to 2009 found that smoky days are associated with a 10.3% increase in hospital visits for asthma, with children five and under most severely affected. Another study from June found that chronic exposure to fine particulate matter in wildfire smoke increases stroke risk in older adults.
Section 5 of the federal Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 says bosses must provide workplaces that are “free from recognized hazards that are causing or are likely to cause death or serious physical harm to his employees.” But Wilkie says he’s concerned that UPS management failed to ensure a hazard-free workplace — despite reported warnings from the union.
Wilkie says he reached out to regional UPS management on July 15, urging them to take proactive action in response to the worsening air quality index, but said they did nothing of substance. The next day, Wilkie says, “it was just business as usual, and they didn’t provide any mask options.” Management did encourage workers to run their fans during the day and take lunch breaks inside, he says, but did little beyond those suggestions. According to Wilkie, “They didn’t say, ‘Hey, if you have concerns about working under the conditions, let us know. You don’t have to work today because it’s hazardous conditions.’”
In some cases, climate change leads to degraded conditions not only for workers but for the communities they serve. In late September 2024, Hurricane Helene hit North Carolina as a Category 4 storm, unleashing flash floods, deluges of rain and overwhelming winds, and killing 107 people in the state, and more than 200 people overall. Front-yard ditches turned into raging rivers, felled trees crushed houses and blocked roads, and mass landslides cut off access to roads. It was the deadliest storm to hit the U.S. mainland since Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Most of the deaths occurred in areas considered low risk for hurricanes — in some cases hundreds of miles from the coast. Hurricane Helene portends what’s to come as the globe warms: scientists say the deadly rains and wind it brought are likely to grow more frequent and severe due to human-made climate change.
For workers at Asheville’s Mission Hospital, the climate crisis became a workplace crisis. The main medical facility in the area, it stayed open even as the hospital lost power for several days and had to switch to backup generators, prioritizing critical equipment. The hospital also lost running water for nearly 11 weeks and had to rely on water from trucks and wells. “Patients had wounds, patients had been exposed to chemicals, fuel and other toxins in the water, patients had been trapped under debris and wreckage, patients were continuing to have strokes and heart attacks, patients with ongoing medical needs, like dialysis, were in bad shape,” according to an October 2024 dispatch from National Nurses United, which represents more than 1,500 nurses at the hospital. “And of course many of the patients were traumatized by the flooding and the horror of watching others die, or their family homes being swept away by the angry, seemingly ever-rising river.”
Kerri Wilson is a nurse at the hospital’s cardiology step-down unit, which treats patients with heart conditions. During the first couple of days of the storm, she was off work and at home with her then eight-year-old son. “When I came back several days after the storm hit, we were still using buckets to flush toilets,” she told me over the phone. “We had the Army Corps of Engineers who came in and figured out a way to drill a well, so we had tanker trucks with water, so we could have water to flush toilets and wash our hands and things. They would deliver these laundry push carts full of water, and we would take our buckets and fill up. Every two hours we were going through, trying to flush toilets, to keep things as sanitary as we could. Just finding somewhere to wash your hands with soap and water was difficult because the sinks weren’t running.”
Susan Coppin works as a case management nurse at the hospital, covering all of its units. She lives in Hendersonville, 23 miles south of the hospital, and had already taken off of work when the storm hit, which was a good thing, she says, because her house was badly damaged. Around five days after the hurricane hit, she went back to work. “I was on a heart unit, I remember, and I had heard that they couldn’t even use the toilets. In patients’ rooms, they put bedside commodes and lined them with garbage bags.”
“I opened up our own bathroom, the employees’ bathroom, and instead of the commode, there’s this bedside commode in our employee bathroom,” she says.
National Nurses United reported that to decontaminate patients, they filled garbage cans with water and poured it over them. Some urinated in buckets. In the immediate aftermath, they say, the ER ran out of food for the workers, though the community stepped in with meals. At one point, the ER was at double its usual capacity, workers reported.
Making the situation more challenging for workers, the hospital became a place of respite for people facing weather-related emergencies. “People from the community who didn’t actually need hospital care had to utilize the hospital because of their chronic health conditions, maybe they were on oxygen at home, or they had an LVAD — a left ventricular assistive device, which is basically a surgically implanted battery pack that helps their heart pump. They need a power source, so if they’re without power at home, they have no way to recharge their batteries,” Wilson says. “And that is truly what keeps them alive. So they were having to utilize the hospital just to keep them alive.”
“For a long time, nursing in particular has been looked at as, ‘They’re this profession of martyrs,’ because most people who go into nursing do want to help people,” Wilson says. “And for many years, it was seen as a calling more than a profession. … These corporations like HCA try to exploit that when you have these natural disasters and things related to climate change.” HCA Healthcare bought Mission Hospital in 2019.
“Nurses tend to sacrifice themselves for their patients, and they exploit that in every way they can. That’s why, when we’re short-staffed, our patients suffer, but we don’t get a lunch break because we’re going to work through it to make sure our patients get everything they need. It’s the same kind of situation when you’re working in the aftermath of Helene and you don’t have appropriate nutrition or water. You just keep going. You put yourself last and do what you can for your patients.”
In response to a request for comment, a spokesperson for HCA Healthcare said, “The interviews and accounts referenced in your questions present an incomplete picture of what occurred at Mission Hospital during and after Hurricane Helene.” The spokesperson also sent an HCA press release titled, “HCA Healthcare to Donate $1 Million Towards Hurricane Helene Disaster Relief Efforts in North Carolina.”
In his book Or Something Worse: Why We Need to Disrupt the Climate Transition, Nicholas Beuret writes that “climate change is creating an increasingly hostile working environment for millions of people.” The transition society is undergoing as a result of climate change, in fact, “is the terrain of contemporary class and social conflict, one that is reshaping our everyday lives and radically transforming political strategy and action,” he writes.
Regular people tend to grasp that there are profound changes taking place. “Overall, 65% of U.S. adults expressed concern that climate change will harm their health,” according to a study published in Health Affairs Scholar in May. Yet, alongside the political failure to curb fossil fuel emissions, the United States does not even offer the most basic worker protections. “Despite clear scientific evidence and well-established solutions that are low-cost and relatively easy to implement, the United States lacks a comprehensive federal standard to protect workers from heat exposure, leaving worker safety dependent on employer discretion and uneven state policies,” states a May 2026 report by Groundwork Collaborative, Workshop, and the Center for Labor and a Just Economy.
This lack of a standard is not inevitable. Rather, it reflects “a coordinated campaign by large corporations, trade associations and allied political actors to resist enforceable heat protections,” report authors Adam Dean and Jamie K. McCallum write. “Major business groups — including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the so-called Coalition for Workplace Safety, and industry associations in construction, agriculture and logistics — have opposed federal efforts to protect workers from extreme heat, characterizing the U.S. Department of Labor’s proposed regulations as ‘rigid,’ ‘burdensome’ and ‘impracticable.’”
With scant protections, Johanna Bozuwa, the executive director of the Climate and Community Institute, a think tank, tells me that “the labor constituency is on the front lines of the climate crisis. And the other piece that’s really clear to me is that it’s also the emergent power base for us to be able to get climate action over the line, because people are so grounded in the realities of their workplace environments becoming more and more hostile to them.”
Workers are increasingly negotiating climate protections into their contracts and fighting for greener schools and more robust climate protections. The United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America has a Green Locomotives campaign aimed at promoting electric rail and reducing filthy locomotive emissions that hurt workers and communities near railyards. And United Auto Workers Region 6 has been involved in efforts to pass legislation in California aimed at decarbonizing the economy and creating green jobs.
UPS drivers in Minnesota face the ongoing challenge of trying to protect the health of workers. Teamsters won some heat protections in their 2023 contract, but when it’s time to negotiate the new deal,” Wilkie says, “we will have to have language in there to protect our drivers from smoke. I don’t think the wildfire problem is going to go away.”
Jacob was just one of several workers who reported troubling health consequences. “I had UPS drivers calling me throughout the day saying, ‘I need to come off route because I’m feeling sick,’” Wilkie says. The following day, he recalls, “we had people who were feeling sick and didn’t feel like they could finish their work because of what they experienced the day prior.”
Wilkie says that filing a formal charge through the state’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration “is still up for debate.”
When I asked UPS to comment on workers’ concerns and reports regarding the wildfire smoke, a company spokesperson sent me a statement, which read, in part, “We follow all federal, state OSHA regulations, and remain focused on supporting our employees while continuing to safely serve our customers and communities.”
“Our operations teams communicate with employees about the conditions in their area and reinforce guidance on staying hydrated, taking breaks as needed, recognizing signs of illness, wearing N95 masks, and seeking medical attention if they are not feeling well,” the statement said.
But Jacob told In These Times that “none of that was communicated to the team.” He said that “no precautions or masks or anything about the conditions was brought up or mentioned to me that day ahead of when I got sick.”
According to the report by Dean and McCallum, UPS has joined companies like Amazon in lobbying to weaken or obstruct heat regulations and “has spent more than $18 million lobbying against regulatory issues in recent years.” The report also notes that OSHA “has cited UPS and Amazon for hundreds of safety violations, including heat-related incidents.” One Texas UPS worker, Chris Begley, died in August 2023 after collapsing in the heat. When wildfire smoke meets climbing temperatures, it creates new levels of workplace hazards.
“On this day, even with caution given by the Teamsters union beforehand, UPS, once again, did not uphold that commitment and failed their staff,” Wilkie says.
This article is a joint publication of In These Times and Workday Magazine, a nonprofit newsroom devoted to holding the powerful accountable through the perspective of workers.
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Sarah Lazare is the editor of Workday Magazine and a contributing editor for In These Times. She tweets at @sarahlazare.
