Oregon public health officials were nearly uniform with their guidance as wildfire smoke swallowed the Northwest in early August: avoid breathing smoke by staying indoors whenever possible.
Particles in wildfire smoke “can cause serious respiratory and circulatory issues, including asthma, cancer, stroke, and lung and heart disease,” the Multnomah County Health Department warned.
But for hundreds of thousands of Oregon workers who keep the state running — farm workers, construction workers, garbage collectors, railroad employees, food vendors, delivery workers and landscapers —- following health officials’ advice is impossible.
Labor leaders around the state told Street Roots they’re grateful for Oregon’s worker protections for smoke and heat, which are ahead of many states.
But the leaders added the laws are not enough, and essential workers’ lives are being meaningfully shortened both by smoke and by politicians’ failures to protect workers from it.
Vomit then back to work
“I do Uber, Lyft and I do deliveries at Amazon and other ones,” said 58-year-old Carlos.
He was out delivering packages in the smoke. Despite having no chronic health conditions, Carlos said he was getting lightheaded while working during the peak of the smoke, and was still feeling the impacts the next day.
“I just feel a little tired, maybe more tired than usual. Maybe I’m not getting enough oxygen?” he said before heading to his next delivery.
Zack Culver leads the Local 737 statewide construction workers’ union. He said many of his union’s nearly 3,000 members worked through the smoke.
“We cover the whole state. We’ve got Eastern Oregon, Central Oregon, and I know that in some instances jobs did shut down due to the smoke,” he said. “But, for the most part, unless it’s really bad, our members go to work.”
Those workers were far from the only ones. Travis Hopkins leads the Roofers and Waterproofers Local 49 union.
“Last week we were out when some of our shops were shut down,” he said, speaking to Street Roots after the smoke. “And there were other roofers on the roofs, still roofing.”
Reyna Lopez is the executive director of the Oregon farmworkers’ union, Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noreste.
“People had to go to work, and that’s just the reality,” Lopez said. “Some of them did experience headaches and nausea when they were working. Some folks had to miss work because they just couldn’t be out there, and it did mean that they lost a whole day of work.”
Unfortunately, that’s far from the only impacts workers have faced.
In 2021, 38-year-old Sebastian Francisco Perez died of heat exhaustion while laying irrigation pipes at a Willamette Valley tree farm in 114 degree heat.
And the year before — when smoke left the valley with the worst air quality on Earth — Lopez said they were getting messages from people experiencing serious health issues, working in evacuation areas and feeling unsafe.
“One of our members, Manuel, reported to me that he was feeling nauseous, that he had extreme headaches, that he went off to the side of the field and vomited at one point,” Lopez said. “He went back to work.”
Symptoms like that are not uncommon during smoke events. Research from California has found wildfire smoke increased respiratory disease-related emergency department visits by more than one-quarter. And the CDC found similar impacts from wildfire smoke on the East Coast in 2023.
A joint Portland State University/Street Roots survey of homeless Portlanders about the 2020 smoke found half of respondents said it impacted their health, 37% reported difficulty breathing and 15% went to the hospital.
The most recent point-in-time count found 16,512 Oregonians are currently experiencing unsheltered homelessness.
Climate change heating up the fight
Smoke events like those are growing more common.
A late-2025 study from the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality found almost every region of Oregon has seen an increase in wildfires and smoke over the last decade.
That problem is likely to get even worse as human-caused climate change leaves the Northwest with hotter and drier summers.
“We’ve already been seeing that happen with the hotter summers and the drier conditions, and so we’ll have to see in the future,” said Noah Alviz, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service’s Portland office.
Lopez, of PCUN, said climate change is intensifying the group’s fight to force companies to create safer environments for workers.
“Labor protections are just one way that we can really adapt to that (climate change) and what’s happening and face the reality that things are changing,” Lopez said.
PCUN’s fight has been notching victories. In summer 2022, Oregon Occupational Safety and Health announced new rules for heat. The agency mandated employers to provide workers heat illness prevention rest breaks, shade and cool water.
Another set of rules from that year looked to start addressing wildfire smoke. The rules required some Oregon employers to monitor air quality and provide workers with high-quality facemasks when steep air quality thresholds are reached.
And a year later in 2023, the state passed a law protecting workers’ right to refuse dangerous work without reprisals. PCUN celebrated the move.
Laws and leverage
Lopez said that those were huge wins. But they’re just the beginning. That’s partly because many employers simply do not follow the laws.
“We know that employers, some of them, aren’t following the law,” they said. “Some of them are upset that we got these things passed, and they tried to sue the states to get to a place where they didn’t have to follow them.”
Workers are also increasingly hesitant to report those violations, Lopez said.
Part of that is because they need their jobs more than ever because of a mix of the brutal economic condition everyone is feeling right now and because people missed so much work during ICE’s intense and sometimes violent winter raids.
But those aren’t the only reasons.
“If our workers put their name on the (report) document and go on the record,” Lopez said, “that unfortunately means that they’re likely to lose their job because their employer finds out, and it’s just a reality for many farm workers that they get retaliated against.”
Lopez said that’s why PCUN wants to ensure OSHA has enough funding to work as it is supposed to, enforcing laws and punishing violators. But the group is also fighting for new protections to better enable farm workers to safely report the dangerous and illegal conditions they face.
“In the legislative session, our focus is going to be very much around protecting farmworkers from retaliation through a Just Cause policy,” they said. “And also protecting their overtime.”
Culver, the construction workers’ union leader, said he also wants to ensure employers are actually following the law, partly by educating members that those protections exist. He said the state also needs to come up with an air quality threshold for when workers get hazard pay.
Health officials stressed that workers should wear masks and take breaks if they can when it is smoky outside.
But Hopkins, the roofing union leader, said people don’t know how hard it can be to wear a mask while working under the sun in extreme heat, and that other protections are needed.
He said he wants to see a threshold where OSHA should shut down work, or at least give workers more flexibility, like six-hour workdays.
“The owners don’t know what the guys feel like after days worth of work. I mean in a situation where their breathing has been compromised all day,” he said. “We just need to put more power into the people who are performing the work’s hands in order to dictate the workload on their body.”
Meanwhile, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration maps show Wasco and Hood River counties — and their blooming fields and fruit orchards — are still blanketed in smoke. The counties have two of the highest concentrations of farm workers outside of the Willamette Valley.
This article appears in August 26, 2026.
