On  July 28, leaders of the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health (National COSH) said that modest steps announced by the White House to protect workers from extreme heat are insufficient.

“Tragically, workers are getting sick and dying every day from the extreme heat driven by climate change,” said Jessica E. Martinez, co-executive director of National COSH, in a blog post on the organization’s website. “This is no time for modest steps. The President, Congress, federal OSHA and state and local officials must take bold action now, to reduce risk and save lives.”

Advocacy groups, like the National Council of Occupational Safety and Health, have called for a national standard protecting workers from climate change’s effects, including smoke, heat stress and severe weather events, like wildfires— as the country continues to deal with extreme heat and air pollution from wildfires in Canada and the western U.S.

Not good enough, the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health complained Friday. 

"Workers are getting sick and dying every day from the extreme heat driven by climate change," said co-executive director Jessica Martinez. 

The group called on Biden to order an emergency temporary standard to better protect workers from heat stress, establish a more stringent permanent threshold for protections and urge states to impose their own rules. 

"This is no time for modest steps."

All employers nationwide are already required to take steps to protect workers from any known hazards on the job. But issuing heat-specific regulations would clearly outline employers’ responsibilities, said Jessica Martinez, co-executive director of the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health, which advocates for safer workplaces.

“Federal law is crystal clear,” said Katelyn Parady, a Phoenix-based worker health and safety professional with National COSH. “Employers are required to provide a workplace free from recognized hazards – and that definitely includes the very dangerous hazards created by current record-breaking temperatures here in Arizona.”

The Republican money bill also reduced OSHA by more than $100 million, drawing criticism from Jessica Martinez, co-executive director of the National Council on Occupational Safety and Health. Martinez called the cuts “dangerous to workplace safety…heartless and ill-advised.”

Like all worker protections, these rules aren’t foolproof: Both labor and business groups have criticized aspects of their implementation. Neither California nor Oregon requires employers to offer more paid breaks on smoky days, a provision unions had requested, said Marcy Goldstein-Gelb, the co-executive director of the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health, which advocates for workers’ rights.

The deadly combination of rising temperatures and wildfire smoke has to be understood as “climate injustice,” says Nancy Lessin, an advisor with National COSH. “This is yet another reason why the labor movement and the climate justice movement need to come together stronger than ever, to look to the future for the kind of prevention needed.”

But “workers don’t just need respirators,” said Peter Dooley of the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health (COSH). “The idea that outside workers are going to be wearing respirators all day is just not realistic.”

But reasonable precautions are expected — for instance, not having children as workers or making people work around human waste. Those are two of the issues called out in the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health‘s latest annual list of “dirty dozen” employers.

Meanwhile, the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health placed Amazon on its 2023 “Dirty Dozen” list of unsafe employers.

Across the country, Swissport workers have been sounding the alarm about the myriad of health and safety issues they say they have been forced to endure. This past April, the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health listed Swissport as one of its Dirty Dozen unsafe employers in the country.

The wildfire smoke spreading across the United States and Canada shows the need for urgent action to protect workers from the ongoing effects of climate change, say leaders of the National Council of Occupational Safety and Health (National COSH).

The wildfires raging in Canada and sending clouds of haze across U.S. cities are proof of the urgent need for federal standards to protect workers from the effects of climate change, the National Council of Occupational Safety and Health said Thursday.

Groups like the National Council of Occupational Safety and Health, also known as National COSH, point out that wildfires have polluted the air in a number of states in recent years, a hazard they and environmental experts attribute to climate change.

“This is not a one-time crisis,” Marcy Goldstein-Gelb, co-executive director of the organization, said in a statement. “Dangerous pollution in the air we breathe will be a fact of life for years to come, because climate change has greatly increased the occurrence of wildfires and other extreme weather events.”

“Right now, only two of 50 states—California and Oregon—have specific safety rules which protect workers from wildfire smoke,” said Marcy Goldstein-Gelb, co-executive director of The National Council of Occupational Safety and Health (National COSH), in a recently published news release. Washington State filed proposed permanent wildfire smoke rules for workers in May 2023.

Swissport was cited nearly 20 times by OSHA investigations nationwide in the past decade for safety violations, from injuries to violations for the agency’s standards on heavy machinery and seatbelts. Last month, the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health listed Swissport among the twelve most dangerous employers in the country, alongside Amazon, Norfolk Southern and Packer Sanitation Services, which was the subject of a national Department of Labor probe on migrant child labor.

Another alarming trend: Black and brown workers die on the job at a higher rate than other workers, a consequence of past and current workplace discrimination. Some of the most egregious offenders, like FedEx, are highlighted in the 2023 Dirty Dozen report released this week by our organization, the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health.

The National Council for Occupational Safety and Health (National COSH) announced today the “Dirty Dozen” list of employers who put workers and communities at risk due to unsafe practices. The Dirty Dozen report is released each year as part of the observance of Workers’ Memorial Week, which takes place this year from April 23 through April 30.

It's easy to see why employers like young workers, Jessica Martinez and Marcy Goldstein-Gelb write at The Progressive. "With less information, less power, and fewer options, they are easier to exploit." There are good reasons to keep kids out of the workplace: They're more prone to injury, and they usually end up falling behind in their education as well. That means it is urgent "to enforce the child labor laws that already exist and push back forcefully against any attempts to weaken them."