Climate change will only exacerbate underlying inequalities.
by Sonali Kolhatkar, Resilience
As temperatures soar in the United States this summer, some among us are lucky enough to be able to remain in air-conditioned interior spaces, ordering food, groceries, clothing, and other products to be delivered to us. The rest, toiling in the extreme heat to pull products off hot warehouse shelves and drop them off curbside in scorching delivery trucks, are risking health and even life. July 2023 marked the planet’s hottest month on record.
In San Bernardino, California, where retail giant Amazon has a massive warehouse and fulfillment center, daily temperatures reached triple digits for the majority of days in July and have been dangerously hot all summer. Workers with the Inland Empire Amazon Workers United (IEAWU) protested the dangerous conditions and complained to CAL-OSHA, the state’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health. One worker, Daniel Rivera, told Fox11, “Amazon’s main focus is production. Safety is not the priority until it’s too late.”
What we are witnessing with such increasingly common instances is capitalism-induced climate change intersecting with capitalism-induced labor exploitation. It’s a deadly combination and one that is being discussed in ways that obscure its causes and solutions.
Take the corporate media, whose coverage has focused on the pro-business buzzword of “productivity.” CBS worried in an August 1, 2023 story, “How Hot Weather Affects Worker Productivity—and What That Means for the Economy.” The New York Times similarly lamented in a July 31, 2023 headline, that “Heat Is Costing the U.S. Economy Billions in Lost Productivity.” The cost to the economy (a euphemism for stock values and profit margins) is the bottom line—not the safety and health of human beings. Therefore, it matters a great deal that, as per the Times, “more than 2.5 billion hours of labor in the U.S. agriculture, construction, manufacturing, and service sectors were lost to heat exposure.”
Recent Posts
The Data Brokers Fueling ICE’s Deportation Machine—And The Union Shareholders Fighting Back
Take Action Now “As investors, we are thinking about this as a risk to our investments, but also as a social and ethical issue.”By Maurizio…
The Murdering Of Boaters Is Public, Not Secret
Take Action Now Murdering boaters is not legal or illegal depending on whether the emperor has called his victims “terrorists.”By David Swanson,…
Tensions In Latin America Rise As U.S. Threatens Venezuela & Colombia
Take Action Now “There seems to be a much bigger political context behind this than really going after drug traffickers, which seems to be … not at…
Still No Jobs Report, But The Labor Market Doesn’t Look Good
Take Action Now Donald Trump has made it clear he doesn’t care about rules and norms. We can assume that he has seen the report, and based on its…