Why the extreme heat is a labor story

Steven Greenhouse, the former labor reporter for The New York Times, writes for Nieman Reports about why rising temperatures are a labor story.

Greenhouse writes, “Many occupational safety experts also fault the media, saying news organizations have done too few stories about this threat to workers and done too little to educate the public about it. ‘The problem is huge, and the media sometimes they just don’t get the breadth of it. There’s a failure to see how it’s affecting many workers,’ says Juley Fulcher, a worker health and safety advocate at Public Citizen. ‘The media is there the moment there is a heat wave. That’s when they show up. The problem is the media isn’t there any other time to cover this problem.’

“Some safety experts say one reason the media — and the nation — pay so little attention to the threat that high heat poses for workers is that the hardest hit occupational group is farmworkers, a group that society often overlooks, partly because it’s largely comprised of low-paid immigrants.

“Extreme heat often sneaks up on workers and can be deadly. A handful of media organizations have taken a close look at the problem.”

Read more here.