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Upton Sinclair Memorial Lecture - Hot Days: How Data and Documents Shined a Light on Heat's Mounting Death Toll on Workers In the US (AIHce EXP 2022 OnDemand)
Course Description:
Recorded at AIHce EXP 2022

The US Occupational Safety and Health Administration's primary responsibility is to protect workers from health hazards. But for decades, the agency has failed to adopt a national heat standard to safeguard workers against hot temperatures, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of American workers and an enforcement system rife with problems.

Workers of color have borne the brunt. As climate change fuels hotter days, the problem is getting worse.

That's the conclusion of a year-long investigation by NPR, The California Newsroom, The Texas Newsroom, Columbia Journalism Investigations and Public Health Watch, as documented in a digital and radio series called "Hot Days." The news organizations teamed up on this series, producing deeply reported national and local stories. Our reporters also tapped into the rich expertise at Columbia University to get beyond anecdote and quantify risk.

The Upton Sinclair Lecture will walk conference attendees through the "Hot Days" investigation, outlining the main findings and providing a window into the labor-intensive reporting process. We will demonstrate how a team of investigative reporters anchored by three CJI fellows used two federal datasets and hundreds of pages of documents on worker heat deaths to expose federal regulators' woeful record of heat-fatality investigations: Absent a legal standard, OSHA often lets companies whose employees have succumbed to heat escape with little penalty. We will rely on a PowerPoint presentation, a video and audio montage of reporters' testimonials, and audio clips of interviews with key sources to help tell the story behind this story, and how OSHA and other federal policymakers have responded in the months since.

Learning Outcomes
At the end of this lecture, attendees will:
  • • Gain a better understanding of how OSHA conducts its inspections and penalizes companies that have had multiple workers die of environmental heat exposure.
  • • Gain a better understanding of how OSHA's regulatory power can be hampered without legal standards that help track and prevent specific categories of worker fatalities.
  • • Learn more about the lengths that inspectors must take to confirm heat-related fatalities in a regulatory system not designed to keep track of such deaths.
  • • Learn more about the work of OSHA's own scientists on a national heat standard, what criteria the agency scientists have created and refined over decades and why.

Contact Hours:
1

Presentation Date:
05/23/2022

Presenters:
Leo Old
Kristen Lombardi

Session recordings are available for 90 days from purchase.


Stock #: AOD22_D8
ISBN #: 
Author/Editor: 

Member $25/Non-Member $35/Student $25

Your Price: $35.00

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