As the sun dipped toward the horizon, pulling the last streaks of daylight from the sky over North Carolina’s capital city, dozens of migrant workers raised flickering tealights.

They gathered with advocates a bit more than a stone’s throw from offices of the state Department of Labor to rally for measures to protect workers from extreme heat in agricultural fields, the food service industry, construction, transportation and warehousing jobs.

José Arturo Gónzalez Mendoza, a 30-year-old farmworker from Guanajuato, Mexico, died Sept. 5 after harvesting sweet potatoes in a Barnes Farming field in Nash County. Temperatures that week rose into the 90s, according to Accuweather.

The state labor department has said it’s investigating his death...

“The majority of heat-related harm is preventable through the implementation of practical measures by employers, yet there are currently no standards targeting the prevention of heat-related illnesses at work,” a petition circulated by the Farmworker Advocacy Network states.

“As the heat in North Carolina continues to intensify and become more humid, we must take long-overdue action to protect essential workers from preventable harm. We must prioritize the lives of North Carolina workers and protect them from the extreme weather conditions they face.”
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Liz Mizelle, a professor of nursing at East Carolina University, has spent a lot of time researching the impacts of extreme heat and climate change on the estimated 150,000 farmworkers in North Carolina.

At the rally in Raleigh, she rattled off statistics about farmworker safety in hopes of spurring change.

Farmworkers are 35 times more likely to die from heat, her research has shown, and that number is even higher for Latinos...