By Anne Blythe
A coalition of organizations focused on worker and human rights spent the past week rallying across North Carolina for support of what could be the first national heat standard, something that farmworkers and others worried about more frequent periods of extreme heat have been advocating for more than a year.
The push comes as the U.S. Department of Labor and its Occupational Safety and Health Administration extended the public comment period for weighing in on a proposed rule to better protect people from extreme heat in indoor and outdoor workplaces.
The Farmworker Advocacy Network, the Hispanic Federation, Toxic Free NC, the North Carolina Justice Center, UE Local 150, a public service workers union, and the AFL-CIO stumped in Raleigh, the seat of state government, Charlotte, the largest city in North Carolina, and Spring Hope, a Nash County town near many of the state’s poultry, tobacco and sweet potato farms.
“Heat safety affects us all — from the person growing our food, working in a warehouse, responding to our emergencies and maintaining our nation’s aging infrastructure,” Joel Bryan, a representative of the Raleigh City Workers Union, UE Local 150, said in a statement circulated by the coalition before the events. “It is imperative that we as a society protect these workers and pass common sense legislation to ensure that they are protected from the effects of heat related illnesses.”
Now you have until Jan. 14, to share your thoughts on the heat standard the Biden administration proposed.
The proposal would require employers to:
- Develop an injury and prevention plan to control heat hazards in workplaces.
- Provide access to cool water and cool or shaded places to rest once combined heat and humidity levels reach 80 degrees.
- Give workers 15-minute breaks every two hours once combined heat and humidity reach 90 degrees.
- Require supervisors to check in on workers who work alone.
- Ease new workers into jobs in the heat to help their bodies adjust to the toll the high temperatures can take.
- Have training and a plan in place for how to respond to workers experiencing signs and symptoms of heat-related illness.
The federal rule, if approved, likely would not go into effect until 2026 because of the many steps of the rule-making process. It’s possible the incoming Trump administration could reverse course.
Getting hotter
Like many places around the world, periods of extreme heat have continued to intensify in North Carolina during the late spring, summer and early fall. High humidity further complicates those stretches of 90-plus degree temperatures, leading to risky working conditions for farm laborers, construction workers, delivery drivers and others.
As the Northern Hemisphere had its hottest meteorological summer on record this year, the Southern Hemisphere had its warmest winter from June to August, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
This summer in North Carolina, there were 4,688 emergency department visits related to heat illness, according to the state Department of Health and Human Services. The most frequent diagnosis encoded during those visits was for heat exhaustion, representing 57.4 percent of the visits. Other illnesses included heat syncope, or fainting, cramps and 397 cases of heat stroke.
Northeastern North Carolina and the Fayetteville area had the highest rates of emergency department visits related to extreme heat, but incidents were reported across the state.
Lamenting losses
The coalition holding rallies across North Carolina this past week highlighted the death of Wednesday “Wendy” Johnson, a 51-year-old postal worker from Cameron who died at Cape Fear Valley Hospital in Fayetteville on June 6 after spending hours in a hot mail truck.
They also lamented the death of Juan José Ceballos, a 33-year-old migrant worker from Mexico who died in Wayne County in July 2023 after suffering what his co-workers described as a heat stroke on a day when the heat index topped 100 degrees.
José Arturo Gónzalez Mendoza, a 30-year-old farmworker from Guanajuato, Mexico, died Sept. 5 after harvesting sweet potatoes in a Barnes Farming field in Nash County. Temperatures that week rose into the 90s, according to Accuweather.
“No one should die because their employer failed to do what is necessary to save their life from known and preventable hazards, including extreme heat. And it is the duty of the Department of Labor to see to it that never happens,” MaryBe McMillan, president of the N.C. State AFL-CIO, said in a statement circulated by the coalition.
Autopsy report finding
The state Department of Labor launched an investigation into Mendoza’s death last year and issued citations against Barnes Farming on March 4.
James Payne, an attorney representing Barnes Farming, reached out to NC Health News last week to dispute conclusions reached by the state labor department’s Occupational Safety and Health Division.
An autopsy conducted by the state Medical Examiner’s Office lists the cause of Mendoza’s death as “possible cardiac arrhythmia in the setting of an undiagnosed pheochromocytoma,” a rare type of tumor that grows in the adrenal glands.
“This report clearly shows that Mr. González Mendoza died as a result of a pre-existing condition,” Payne said in a statement sent to NC Health News. “This is a major defeat for NC OSHA who jumped to a conclusion that the fatality was a heat related death and have pursued that narrative without knowing or waiting for the findings of fact.”
Barnes Farming has appealed the labor department’s citations. A spokesperson for the department told NC Health News in an email this week the case is pending before the Occupation Safety and Health Review Commission.
The labor department “made its conclusion without the findings of fact and then pursued an investigation under the assumption that Mr. González Mendoza died from cardiac arrest as a result of heat-related conditions, environmental exposure, and dehydration,” Payne added. Payne further contended that “without qualification to make such a determination,” the labor department investigation “concluded in error” that González Mendoza’s death “was a result of heat conditions.”
However, legal scholars often argue that even if someone suffers an injury, and it’s subsequently discovered that person had a pre-existing condition, that doesn’t necessarily preclude the party that’s potentially responsible from liability, a common law doctrine referred to as the “eggshell skull rule.”
Efforts to discuss the autopsy report with the medical examiner were unsuccessful. The autopsy states on that Sept. 5, the temperature was “a high of 94 degrees” and does not exclude heat from playing a role in the arrhythmia.
Growing body of research on heat
The American Heart Association released a study last month that showed extreme heat could “double or triple the risk of irregular heart rhythms in people with implanted defibrillators.”
The findings, which came from examining health data for more than 2,000 U.S. adults with the defibrillators, come as the heart association estimates that more than 12 million people will be living with atrial fibrillation, or AFib, by 2030.
Just as heat standards have been slow to come at the federal level, researchers said, “the role of heat-induced stress in triggering this condition remains understudied.”
“We need to understand the physiological processes underlying these findings and concentrate on preventing conditions that trigger AFib to minimize the burden of arrhythmias,” said Dr. Theofanie Mela, a cardiology researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and co-author of the study. “In the meantime, we recommend patients avoid extreme temperatures and use air conditioners so that they do not expose their bodies to the severe stress of extremely high heat.”
Although that research focused on adults with implanted defibrillators, a different study published this month in Science Advances, “the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s (AAAS) open access multidisciplinary journal,” delves into the effects of heat on young people in Mexico.
The researchers found “heat disproportionately kills young people” and measured heat by looking at the wet-bulb temperature, which includes humidity assessment of heat and better reflects how humans experience hot, humid weather.
“Heat-related mortality is expected to increase under climate change,” the researchers wrote in their study introduction. “As the evidence base has grown, multiple studies have found that the elderly are especially vulnerable to heat. Furthermore, many other studies have expressed particular concern for joint heat and humidity extremes, given the importance of perspiration for human thermoregulation.”
In the study, the researchers explored the relationship between humid heat and mortality in Mexico, a country that keeps detailed data on both deaths and on weather conditions.
“Our finding that young people in Mexico are especially vulnerable to heat may have global implications because hotter and lower-income countries — which are expected to be the most adversely affected by climate change — have among the youngest populations in the world currently and over the coming century,” the researchers wrote.
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