On a blistering day in May 2008, seventeen-year-old farmworker María Isabel Vásquez Jiménez was tying grapevines in a vineyard outside Stockton, California, when the temperature crept past 100 degrees Fahrenheit. It was only her second day on the job. She was two months pregnant and, according to investigators, had little access to shade or cool drinking water. After hours beneath the sun, she fainted.Rather than call an ambulance, supervisors drove her to a parking lot, where her fiancé tried to revive her with a wet cloth. By the time she reached a clinic, her body temperature had climbed to 108 degrees Fahrenheit. Two days later, she was gone.Part of the tragedy was that California’s laws should have kept María alive. In 2005, California passed the nation’s first heat standard — a policy that required water, shade, and rest breaks for outdoor workers. María’s death showed that such words on paper were not enough and spurred California to ratchet up enforcement efforts in 2010.With these reforms in place, employer compliance increased and heat-related fatalities dropped sharply. Our research found that California’s heat standard decreased deaths by 31 percent and may have prevented roughly thirty-four worker deaths every year from 2010 through 2020. With death rates climbing around the United States, extending these protections to workers throughout the country could save as many as 1,500 lives each year.The findings are urgent because extreme heat has become one of the most dangerous and least regulated workplace hazards in America. Heat-related workplace deaths have more than doubled over the past twenty-five years, a trend driven by rising temperatures that place growing numbers of workers at risk.Outdoor workers who harvest our crops, pave our roads, and collect our trash now labor under conditions that grow more punishing each year. Agricultural workers alone are roughly thirty-five times more likely to die from heat exposure than the…
