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It’s Earth Day, and here in North America, calm and sunny spring days can make it easy to forget the sweltering summer that’s on its way. Yet within weeks, we’ll be reminded here in the U.S. of the dangers of extreme heat, its threat to business infrastructure as temperatures climb, and increasingly, its growing impact on workers and their safety.
The issue of extreme heat, and climate change’s impact on workers, is one that should concern anyone thinking about the future of work and the future of workers. A new peer-reviewed study published last week in the journal Nature found that damages from climate change will set the global economy back an estimated $38 trillion a year by 2049, with a likely range of between $19 trillion and $59 trillion.
Also last week, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill, effective July 1, that will prevent local governments from making employers or contractors meet heat exposure mandates which are not required under state or federal law. The law makes Florida the second state (Texas being the other) to ban local governments from implementing workplace heat standards, according to a new report from the National Commission on Climate and Workforce Health being released today, while five states (California, Colorado, Minnesota, Oregon and Washington) have codified heat safety standards. A federal heat safety standard is expected to be years away.
The commission’s report, its first, pulls together insights from other studies, including that just 17% of CEOs have invested in strategies to protect employees from climate health risks and that extreme heat alone generates productivity loss of more than 295 billion work hours globally each year. It also shares takeaways from discussions with more than 100 business leaders. I chatted with Steven Levine, a cofounder of Health Action Alliance, which leads the new commission (see excerpts from our interview below) for this week’s newsletter.
Hope it’s a great week.
HUMAN CAPITAL
Worker activism is costing people their jobs—and creating difficult situations for leaders as they try to navigate employees’ outspoken efforts. Last week, Google fired 28 workers who protested the company’s billion-dollar Israeli cloud contract, Forbes’ Siladitya Ray reports. Media reports shared an internal memo announcing the workers’ terminations, alleging the protesting employees “took over office spaces, defaced our property, and physically impeded the work of other Googlers.” The group behind the protests, No Tech for Apartheid, said in a statement late Wednesday the workers had the “right to peacefully protest about terms and conditions of our labor,” and the firings were “retaliatory.” Also last week, an NPR editor resigned after being suspended, following his public criticisms of the network’s coverage as being too left-leaning.
REMOTE WORK
Wall Street’s bankers are getting back to the office, driving the New York City office occupancy rate to gradually increase to nearly 80% of its pre-pandemic rate, senior contributor Jack Kelly reports. The research was conducted by Placer.ai, a platform that specializes in location data and foot traffic insights. The report came the same week Nike’s CEO caused a stir for appearing to blame the company’s innovation problems on remote work. Last October, Nike said employees would need to begin working from the office four days a week earlier this year.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Do you have a chief AI officer? Do you need one? Contributor Sandy Carter writes about the hottest new job in the C-suite—which, according to Foundry’s AI Priorities Study 2023, is represented at 11% of midsize to large organizations. Meanwhile, Jack Kelly spoke with EY Americas vice chair of consulting Raj Sharma about his optimism for humans’ role when it comes to AI and jobs, and Forbes’ tech team launched The Prompt: our new newsletter focused on AI technology. Don’t miss the launch edition, and sign up here.
POLICY + PRACTICE
The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission released the final version of its rule implementing the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act last week, saying that abortion-related accommodations are included under the PWFA, which was passed by Congress in 2022. The act was a significant step in protecting the rights of pregnant workers, writes senior contributor Kim Elsesser, requiring employers with at least 15 workers to provide them with “reasonable accommodations” for limitations related to “pregnancy, childbirth or related medical conditions.”
WHAT’S NEXT: Health Action Alliance Co-CEO Steven Levine
Levine, the co-CEO of Health Action Alliance, a network of employers and public health groups like the CDC Foundation, recently launched an initiative focused on workforces and climate change, the National Commission on Climate and Workplace Health. This Earth Day, the commission issued its first report, which was sponsored by strategic partner Mercer and companies like the Hartford. Forbes spoke with Levine about why employers aren’t doing more, what business leaders need to know and why more companies are concerned about their workers’ eco-anxiety.
What, concretely, will the commission be doing?
The World Health Organization is saying that our changing climate represents the single biggest threat facing humanity. … We are not recognizing the vulnerabilities we have that are driven by these more frequent and severe weather events. The commission is really committed to conducting research, developing employer resources and best practices, and raising awareness among employers and the business community about these increased threats.
With actuaries at Mercer and public health experts we’re developing a first of its kind financial risk assessment tool. It will debut in September, pulling claims-level data from the thousands of companies [Mercer] works with and matching that data against public health reports and weather reports to identify spikes in health care costs that align with extreme heat events or poor air quality events.
What other employers are involved?
We’re proud to have the chief medical officer of Disney Parks and Experiences. They have a large outdoor workforce and guest customer base. The chief medical officer for global employee health at Google is brilliant and really thoughtful about these issues. We have the chief medical officer from the Hartford.
Some of what Google shared with us which I found really interesting is that when severe weather impacts data centers or some of their major infrastructure in one area of the country or the world, they have to really think about redundancy and resilience in a whole other way. The other thing I would say is that Google and many others are also really focused on how climate is taking a toll on the mental health of their employees. There have been several studies that have pointed to eco-anxiety impacting a large base of employees, particularly among younger workers.
What were the big takeaways you heard from talking to business leaders for this report?
There were five key takeaways. One is that most employers do not see our changing climate or extreme weather as a health issue. They see these as very separate issues. And it’s because the way that we’re organized in companies is we have one team that’s dedicated to employee health, and we have another team dedicated to sustainability. Those do not cross. The second is there is a real uncertainty about how to quantify this risk. The next is that we really do not know what interventions are effective today. There are a whole lot of products on the market. There are a whole lot of recommendations, but, really, there is a lack of authoritative guidance that is research-backed.
The other piece that is more “meta” here is that [leaders say] this challenge feels too big to tackle. That’s because when we talk about climate change as an issue, we often talk about it sort of globally as a global crisis … that it’s really too complex for any one company to even start to think about how they would address it. They just put it on the backburner because it’s just not something that is rising to the top of the priority list. … The last piece is that right now, there is no cross-sector collaboration.
Does the commission have a lobbying or government affairs role?
No. What I would say is that the better we understand the risks that our climate is posing to workforce health, the more prepared lawmakers will be to consider appropriate public policy options.
So there’s an absence of government standards on extreme heat and workers at the federal level. But then there’s these laws being passed in states like Florida and Texas. Does the commission have a position on those?
We’re not commenting on specific policies. I will say that there are five other states that have standard protections for workers as well, and we certainly recognize that government standards play a role in protecting workers.
I had a feeling you weren’t going to give an answer on that. How much are you working with the startup community working on wearables or other technology to help address extreme heat?
We have had several conversations with some of those startups. We’re excited to see how we can start putting some of those solutions to the test to see what works, particularly among workers who are the most vulnerable. Our vision is to ultimately have a really robust marketplace [where] we can sort of confidently say, here are research-backed solutions that you should feel confident in investing in for your workforce.
VIDEO
STRATEGIES & ADVICE
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FACTS + COMMENT
KPMG’s latest pulse survey of CEOs showed nearly nine in 10 CEOs are confident the U.S. economy will grow in the next year. Forbes’ Megan Poinski spoke with KPMG U.S. CEO and Chair Paul Knopp about the business optimism.
78%: Nearly four in five CEOs are confident in the growth prospects of the global economy, according to KPMG’s survey.
41%: The percentage of CEOs who plan to increase their investment in generative AI over the next year, according to KPMG’s survey.
“The data [is] kind of turning on its head from the last study we did: More CEOs are saying that hybrid [work] is the future, as opposed to being back in the office.”—Paul Knopp, KPMG’s U.S. Chair and CEO
QUIZ
Which of the following metro areas did not place among the top five cities for percentage growth of tech workers since 2019, according to a new report from venture capital firm SignalFire?
- Austin
- Seattle
- Dallas-Fort Worth
- San Francisco Bay Area
Click here to see if you got the right answer!
