Forced to Work on an Overheating Planet

Workers on the front lines of climate change are treated as expendable. This is morally bankrupt and unsustainable

As the planet heats up, labour conditions are rapidly shifting. Climate change is supercharging exploitation and normalising unsafe work as corporations continue to prioritise profits over workers’ rights and wellbeing.

This new era needs more than just new kinds of labour protections. Entire sectors of the economy need to be restructured before they become even more lethal. Treating workers as expendable assets is as grotesque as it is economic folly. As one farmworker organiser told me, if companies continue on this path they “will go belly up”.

This is not hyperbole. The signs are clear in agriculture, construction, food service, even bag handling at airports. But policymakers and managers – not to speak of boards and shareholders – show little interest in the warning. They have long presided over environmental harms and forms of production that are incompatible with decent labour conditions and human flourishing. Now, extreme heat and other consequences of climate change are transforming workplaces into sites that meet the legal, US definition of trafficking (labour under force, fraud or coercion).

This gives rise to some thorny questions. As old forms of exploitation grow and new forms of abuse emerge, what will count as severe enough to warrant prevention, protection and prosecution (known in anti-trafficking policy circles as the 3 P’s) in the future? Do we resign ourselves to a dystopia where ‘ever worse’ becomes the norm? Or do we, as a society, undertake the large-scale restructuring necessary to ensure decent working conditions for workers?

If we choose the latter, it will require a new understanding of trafficking that includes a vastly larger population of workers, along with new commitments to workers’ protections. The current political climate is hardly conducive to this – the Trump administration’s avaricious, anti-science, and short-term policymaking is instead intensifying a race to the bottom. Nonetheless, we must continue to push for a reimagined economy that prioritises the dignified and safe treatment of workers, or the sectors we need to survive may well come to a sudden stop.

Labour conscription and coercion

As an anthropologist, I have been speaking with labourers working on the front lines of climate change, particularly in places that recently flooded or burned. Heat, and climate change more broadly, have exposed a deep contradiction within many sectors of today’s carbon-based economy.

While jobs in agriculture for example are essential to sustaining life, workers are treated as easily replaceable. They are. Criminalising unauthorised immigration has created a pool of workers with few job opportunities other than those that are the most dangerous, dirty, and dehumanising.

Climate change has further accelerated low-wage workers’ exploitation, such as labouring through toxic wildfire smoke, active evacuation zones, and contaminated flood waters. To convince anyone to work in these harmful sites, employers must effectively conscript workers and coerce labour out of them.

They were being forced to pick when smoke and fire were everywhere

They do this by leveraging factors that make workers vulnerable. For decades the US’s immigration system, a defacto deportation regime, has made all unauthorised workers – as well as those with work visas – vulnerable to exploitation, including trafficking. Trump’s cruel obsession with immigration enforcement has deepened the pool of precarious workers. Other factors, such as poverty, linguistic limitations, and working alongside extended family and friends from one’s home village, further compromise workers’ ability to call out mistreatment.

This includes sexual assault. Women stay quiet because they fear retaliation not only for themselves, but also against their coworkers who are family and friends. And I’ve heard, time and time again, that workers cannot afford even one day without work. In short, workers are strongly disincentised to walk away or report abuse while, at the same time, extreme heat is further worsening their daily working conditions.

Let’s look, for example, at what is happening in the grape fields of northern California. Famed for its wine, this region also regularly experiences wildfire (all of California is referred to as a wildfire zone). Many agricultural workers in that area are poor, undocumented and indigenous. In interviews they said employers put substantial pressure on them to continue working through toxic wildfire smoke, even in active evacuation zones.

Workers described vans sent to pick up workers who had evacuated to shelters. They said growers didn’t always explicitly tell them they must work, but when the vans showed up they felt they couldn’t say no. As one organiser explained: “It’s not really a choice. They were being forced to pick when smoke and fire were everywhere.”

Workers’ expendability is unmistakable. From jerry rigging their own bandanas into makeshift PPE, to feeling coerced to work no matter the conditions, workers accede to working during and after disasters in large part out of fear of being reported to Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE).

An emergency governance regime takes over during disasters that suspends the few protections low-wage workers might have. In the midst of raging fires and mandated evacuation, for example, localities often issue “access passes” to agricultural workers. Growers also pressure workers to sign liability waivers. While these waivers – and fire insurance – protect growers, workers risk heat exhaustion, exposure to toxins, and the terror of encroaching fire and emergency evacuation.

Workers’ fear of deportation also leads them to eschew government assistance after their own losses to fire or floods. An attorney in Northern California recounted, for example, how agricultural workers slept on beaches after a fire ravaged their community because they feared that ICE would arrest them in shelters.

Climate canaries

Heat isn’t just transforming agricultural work. A whole range of workers not traditionally understood as vulnerable are learning that they are quickly becoming so as temperatures rise.

Photo by Baptiste Buisson on Unsplash

This includes people in manufacturing plants and restaurant kitchens, where cooling systems cannot keep pace with spiking temperatures; airport workers in literal hotspots like Phoenix and Las Vegas, where planes are grounded because of the heat; and delivery workers, who retrieve packages from inside trucks that heat-up like ovens.

What these workers have in common is that they labour in sites being grievously altered by climate change. In interviews, such workers have told me that they have experienced breathing difficulties, fainting, and complications with pre-existing conditions like diabetes. These are early warnings – a kind of climate canary in the coal mine – not just about worker safety but about the harmful future that capitalism is driving us to enter.

We are at a tipping point in the struggle for worker justice. If we don’t begin to prioritise people over profits, even more workers will perish alongside the planet.

There is still time to challenge – legally and politically – the normalisation of heat-related harms. In the 20 years that the US has offered anti-trafficking assistance, it has awarded only a paltry number of visas to exploited workers. It would be imprudent to imagine that it could simply be expanded to account for climate dangers. As many activists, scholars, and attorneys around the globe have noted, anti-trafficking policies and programmes have been far more effective as punitive anti-sex work and migration controls than in assisting exploited, undocumented individuals.

The current anti-trafficking regime cannot possibly address the sheer number of workers whose livelihoods will, sooner or later, depend upon them risking their lives in the lethal working conditions created by incessant carbon emissions. A new template for anti-trafficking that combines worker safety with mandated fossil fuel reduction is needed to both drive down rising temperatures and to ensure dignified and safe work.

—-

Denise Brennan is Professor of Anthropology at Georgetown University. She is the author of Life Interrupted: Trafficking into Forced Labor in the United States and What’s Love Got to Do with It? Transnational Desires and Sex Tourism in the Dominican Republic. She and Xitlalli Almendariz Alvarez are finishing a book on undocumented life in the U.S.: Policing Political Possibility: Borders, Communities, and Classrooms. She will be a Fellow at Harvard Radcliffe Institute in 2025-26 to write a new book on exploitation and climate change: Work through Disaster: Labor and Trafficking Amidst Climate Ruin.

This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.

Labour conscription and coercion

Climate canaries

About the Author