This is the first in WUNC's series Scorched Workers. Read Part 2, or see more from the project.
This summer, it happened again.
A migrant farmworker died during a record heat wave in eastern North Carolina.
Juan José Ceballos, 33, experienced heatstroke on July 6 in Wayne County, where the heat index was 108 degrees Fahrenheit. The North Carolina Department of Labor is still investigating his employer, Gracia & Sons LLC.
Ceballos was from Mexico, like José Arturo Gonzalez Mendoza, who was 30 when he died from heat exhaustion on Sept. 5, 2023, in Nash County. State investigators cited his employer, Barnes Farming, with several violations in his death. The company is contesting the fines.
The heat here isn’t the same as in Mexico. The heat here is more intense.Odilón, 36, a longtime seasonal farmworker from Mexico
And earlier this summer, U.S. postal worker Wednesday “Wendy” Johnson, 51, died in Fayetteville after spending hours in a hot mail truck. OSHA is investigating her death as a heat-related incident.
The recent incidents are setting off a wake-up call across North Carolina about the realities for outdoor workers with scant workplace protections and for whom heat presents a deadly threat.
At least 15 workers have died from heat-related illnesses in North Carolina since 2008, including a handful of farmworkers and landscapers, according to state and federal fatality records.
Across the country, one-third of all heat fatalities among workers were Latinos from 2010 to 2021, according to U.S. labor statistics reported by NPR.
But these kinds of deaths are hard to track due to the diverse nature of heat illness symptoms, and may be vastly underestimated on a national scale, according to labor regulators.
Just this summer, health officials in North Carolina reported nearly 4,000 heat-related emergency room visits.
Amid the record-breaking temperatures fueled by climate change, workers who cannot avoid outdoor exposure face a disproportionate impact of rising heat.
Migrant farmworkers on the front lines of rising heat
At a rural farmworker house about 45 minutes south of Raleigh, an aging Department of Labor sign is stapled to old wood paneling at the end of a short hallway.
The sign reads “HEAT KILLS” and lists guidelines for farm employers to prevent heat stress among their workers. Three farmworkers who died in 2006 are named.
The sign is in English. None of the ten Mexican workers who live there can read it.
These men called North Carolina home a few months out of the year under the H-2A guest worker program, which allows U.S. employers to hire foreign workers for seasonal agricultural jobs.
North Carolina is one of the top users of the program, bringing roughly 20,000 seasonal farmworkers with H-2A visas to cut, pick and harvest tobacco, sweet potatoes, watermelon, and even Christmas trees.
This wasn’t what they told me it was like back home. It was difficult with so much heat. But, what was I supposed to do? It’s not like I could just go back to Mexico. No way.José, 21, a first-time tobacco worker
The vast majority are from Mexico, and a minority from Haiti and South Africa. That doesn’t include the thousands of other farmworkers who are undocumented.
Odilón, 36, has come to North Carolina for more than a decade to work the fields.
He traded the limes and oranges of his native Veracruz for the tobacco and sweet potato in North Carolina. This has helped him earn many times over a week’s worth of farm labor in Mexico. But North Carolina's heat, he said, feels different.
“The heat here isn’t the same as in Mexico,” said Odilón in Spanish. “The heat here is more intense.”
WUNC is only using the workers’ first names to protect their identities.
Odilón said he doesn’t need to hear the science of climate change to believe it; he’s lived it.
“It used to be a bit cooler in previous seasons,” he explained. “You could last longer out there on the fields.”
North Carolina is experiencing more heat and humidity
The North Carolina State Climate Office reports hotter, more humid days and warmer nights are occurring more frequently.
State labor laws generally mandate a workplace free from hazards, including heat-related injuries. But North Carolina doesn’t have a heat safety standard, which could reduce work in extreme heat by mandating breaks.
Such standards have been adopted by five major agricultural states, including California and Oregon. This summer, the Biden administration proposed a first-ever federal heat standard.
Experts and workers say it takes time to get acclimated to the humid heat that makes North Carolina a billion-dollar powerhouse in the U.S. for tobacco and sweet potato production.
Odilón recounted an incident this summer when another worker named Fidel fainted while they were working in the tobacco fields. It was his first time coming to work with an H-2A visa.
“We were in a field that didn’t have any oxygen. You could hardly breathe,” Odilón said. “It was hot. We were pressured to get as much work done as we could.”
Odilón helped carry Fidel out of the tobacco field. When Fidel regained consciousness, Odilón said he was denied medical attention and was instead told to go sit in a truck with the A/C on to recover.
That day, Aug. 2, state climate records show it was 95 degrees Fahrenheit, but the heat index reached up to 103 in Harnett County, around where they were working.
In a phone interview with WUNC, Fidel said he wasn’t given any days to acclimate and had to start working right after arriving from Mexico.
“(We were) cutting tobacco without stopping, without a break,” said Fidel. “The boss didn’t like when we stopped to take a breath or go into the shade for a few minutes.”
He fainted after only two weeks on the job. He’s since fled the workplace out of fear of the working conditions.
“I had no other option but to get out of there,” he said.
Workers feel rising heat differently
The North Carolina Department of Labor calls what happened to Fidel a “heat-related incident” which is “prevalent in the state when outdoor temperatures exceed 95 degrees Fahrenheit with high relative humidity.”
Different types of outdoor workers are at risk of experiencing heat-related incidents.
Thomas Arcury is a retired Wake Forest University researcher whose career encompassed farmworkers’ extreme work conditions.
He explained several factors go into how a worker experiences heat: the intensity of labor, the time spent outdoors, the clothes worn, and access to water, rest and shade.
He said tobacco farmworkers especially face grueling heat.
“Let’s say you’re between the rows of tobacco and there is no breeze,” said Arcury. “It actually gets hotter in between there because there’s no air movement at all in those rows.”
Migrant farmworkers also face language barriers and pressure to get the job done. Many worry about the threat of not getting called back to work the following year.
“It’s the pressure, too, that causes you to work and get dehydrated,” said Odilón. “It’s why some workers don’t last.”
For farmworkers, cooling is a privilege, not a right
Advocates and researchers say the agricultural industry is rife with exploitative practices that become deadly when compounded with climate change, according to Leticia Zavala, a longtime farmworker activist in eastern North Carolina.
“We have practices of not giving breaks… not having water accessible in the fields that’s cold and clean… (and) not having air conditioning units in their housing facilities,” said Zavala, a former farmworker. “And that leads to death.”
Few states mandate cooling in farmworker housing, according to a previous study authored by Arcury and other researchers. North Carolina’s Migrant Housing Act doesn’t address cooling, but requires growers to provide heating if the outside temperature drops below 50 degrees Fahrenheit.
When it comes to cooling, workers are on the hook themselves. Odilón and the other workers he lived with bought window units for their home. At around $120 or $150 a pop, each unit was worth about 10 hours of work in the fields.
Other workers rely entirely on box fans.
“This wasn’t what they told me it was like back home,” said José, a first-time tobacco worker. “It was difficult, with so much heat. But, what was I supposed to do? It’s not like I could just go back to Mexico. No way.”
José, 21, lived in an aging house surrounded by tobacco and watermelon fields in Sampson County.
One of his housemates, Arturo, acknowledged he had it easier than others.
“I don’t experience the heat like they do. I work with watermelons,” Arturo said. “They have to be crouched down and it gets hotter.”
To get through the hottest summer days, Arturo slept with six different box fans creatively arranged around his small twin bed.
“It’s getting more and more dangerous for people to be out harvesting crops in the temperatures that we're getting,” said Zavala, the farmworker advocate.
Strenuous work conditions also exist at airports
While calls for heat-specific protections are growing for farmworkers, the same is occurring in a different outdoor workplace: airports.
Airport workers face miles upon miles of concrete, steel and pavement that radiate heat intensely. At the Charlotte-Douglas International Airport, airport workers belonging to labor union BJ32 of the Service Employees International Union spoke with WUNC about the scorching conditions associated with rushing from plane to plane.
Cabin cleaner Maribel McBeath, 64, said she and other workers are often not provided transportation to move between planes, so they end up walking miles outside around the tarmac.
“We're going through all this heat. We're going into a plane that doesn't have any (air conditioning),” McBeath said. “It is so bad that we feel sick sometimes from moving around and trying to hurry up and get the work done, because they give you a time limit.”
Not unlike the migrant laborers interviewed for this story, McBeath and her airport colleagues describe strenuous work conditions, including inadequate access to water and inconsistent, if any, breaks during their shifts.
Fellow airplane cabin cleaner Priscilla Hoyle laughed when asked if she got more than one break in a workday.
“It’s crazy because it can be 90 degrees outside, but on that concourse — on the bottom of the planes — it feels like a hundred or something to us,” said Hoyle, 32. “All that walking up and down the stairs, hopping plane to plane, makes it ten times hotter.”
On June 3, Hoyle was working inside a plane with no air conditioning when she overheated and vomited. She said she asked for help repeatedly, but did not receive medical attention. State climate records show that day’s heat index was 84 degrees.
The airport workers WUNC spoke to work for ABM Industries, a third-party sanitation subcontractor for American Airlines. ABM did not respond to WUNC requests for comment.
“I've been here for 11 years, and I want to see a change,” said McBeath. “I want to be able to walk around and be able to breathe. We want better working conditions so we can do our job.”
'Nobody should have to get sick to make a living'
Experts say climate change means extreme heat days and heat-related illnesses will continue to get more common and more severe.
Airport sanitation worker LaShonda Barber said this is why she and all outdoor workers are calling for heat specific protections.
“The government needs to put some laws in place where these big billion dollar companies take care of their workers,” said Barber. “Because without us, these jobs won’t get done.”
Experts argue under current conditions, the long-term prospect for workers is grim.
“They die,” said Arcury, the retired Wake Forest researcher. “Nobody should have to get sick to make a living. We have to give workers permission to be safe and not just worry about production.”
Support for this story comes from the Kozik Environmental Justice Reporting Grants funded by the National Press Foundation and the National Press Club Journalism Institute.
