Workplaces as Sites of Climate Adaptation: Public Mobilizations around OSHA’s Workplace Heat Standards

• In Event: Environmental Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 7: Law, Institutions, and Governance Systems

Abstract

Climate change elevates temperatures exacerbating heat-related illnesses among workers, but research on attitudes toward heat safety regulations remains limited. Theoretically, our study bridges scholarships on labor-climate politics and occupational heat safety by analyzing federal heat rulemaking as a politically and socially contested climate project. We analyze 41,390 individual commenters and petitioners to OSHA’s first nationwide proposal for workplace heat standards. Linking manually and computationally generated discourse measures, county-level socio-economic data, temperature rates, and gender inferred from names, we assess how attitudes, sentiments, and campaign participations vary across expertise claims, gender identity, and heat proximity. Mixed effects logistic and OLS regressions reveal significant gender and expertise differences of support, recognition of at-risk groups, and comment frames. Supporters are disproportionately women and commenters sharing embodied experiences while opponents tend to be men and traditional expertise commenters. Additionally, embodied commenters center food service workers but not farm workers while traditional expertise commenters center marginalized social groups. Heat proximity only conditionally matters in influencing campaign participation. Commenters from environmental campaigns tend to come from colder counties while those in worker rights’ campaigns tend to come from hotter counties. Although our one campaign opposing heat standards came from construction individuals from hotter counties, these are driven by county-level partisan and economic contexts. Our findings underscore workplaces as emerging sites for the politics of climate adaptation.

Authors

• Todd Lu, University of Cincinnati

• Jacob Conley, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

• Spencer Dean Jarrett, University of Cincinnati