Palisades Fire that started in the City of Los Angelas, January 2025. Photo credit: CAL FIRE_Official, Wikimedia Commons, publc domain.
Unions such as The Los Angeles Federation of Labor and The California Teachers Association are providing resources to impacted communities. We applaud UTLA’s leadership in the unified response from united unions in the LA Unified School District to protect children and their families during this ongoing tragedy.
There are several ways to help support and make donations to victims of the wildfires. LA’s Mask Bloc has a form for people to request masks or offer volunteer time. As a means of survival, some displaced Black families, formerly of Altadena, have resorted to the crowdfunding platform GoFundMe to rebuild through financial support as the fires continue to ravage L.A. Be advised that any rent increases above 10% are considered price gouging which can be reported anywhere in the country, and by calling LA 311 at 213-473-3231 or by reporting it to the LA County Department of Consumer and Business Affairs if you live in Los Angeles.
The Fires Are Not a Natural Disaster.
Much has been reported on how climate change is fueling the fires that are ravaging Los Angeles. We have been introduced to the concept of “whiplash” – wide swings between wet and dry conditions. Whiplash, we have learned, has increased because of a more volatile climate. A heated planet leads to erratic rainfall leading to this destructive whiplash. After suffering decades of drought, California then was hit with extremely heavy rainfall in 2022 and 2023 – only to revert back to very dry conditions in the fall and winter of 2024. The heavy rains enabled the grasses and shrubs to wildly grow, and then the droughts dried that vegetation to its current dangerous flammable state.
Wildfires are highly unusual in Southern California in January, which is supposed to be the rainy season. Melting Arctic ice creates changes in the jet stream’s behavior that make wind-driven large wildfires in California more likely. Climate scientists told Yale E360 that with climate change, California’s dry season has extended into early winter when the Santa Ana winds – which bring hot, dry air from the mountains out to sea during the winter months – typically form. The scientist said that this, “is the key climate change connection to Southern California wildfires.” As the atmosphere warms, hotter air evaporates water and can intensify drought more quickly.
The Guardian explains how the “ingredients for these infernos in the Los Angeles area, near-hurricane strength winds and drought, foretell an emerging era of compound events – simultaneous types of historic weather conditions, happening at unusual times of the year, resulting in situations that overwhelm our ability to respond.
“These fires are an especially acute example of something climate scientists have been warning about for decades: compound climate disasters that, when they occur simultaneously, produce much more damage than they would individually. As the climate crisis escalates, the interdependent atmospheric, oceanic and ecological systems that constrain human civilization will lead to compounding and regime-shifting changes that are difficult to predict in advance.”
“It’s very clear that something is off, and that something is that we’re pumping an insane amount of carbon into the atmosphere and causing the climate systems to go out of whack,” Climate Central senior research associate Kaitlyn Trudeau told The New York Times.
Instead of getting emissions to a life-sustaining level, last year countries released record amounts of planet warming gases into the atmosphere, even as the consequences of climate change have become painfully clear. U.S. efforts to cut emissions largely stalled last year.
Fossil Fuels Have Driven the Climate Crisis and Are Fueling These Fires.
The greenhouse gases humans continue to emit are fueling the climate crisis and making big fires more common in California. The science is clear: “Emissions from the world’s 88 largest fossil fuel companies are responsible for 37% of the cumulative area burned by forest fires in the western US and south-western Canada between 1986 and 2021.”
California has been part of a growing number of states and local governments attempting to hold Big Oil and Gas accountable through litigation. Lawsuits against oil companies and the American Petroleum Institute accuse them of deceiving the public regarding the connection between fossil fuels and climate crisis and profiting from that deception. The plaintiffs hope to redirect those corporate profits into funds to address the damage of climate crisis.
And the catastrophic damage occurring right now in the nation’s second largest city is almost incalculable – exceeding estimates of $135 billion – with the human death toll of 13 as of Saturday evening, and the fires still raging.
Relying on Incarcerated Workers
One way California tries to compensate for its underfunded and understaffed fire services is the use of prison labor. Incarcerated people make up nearly a third of firefighting crews across the state.
The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said last Thursday that it had deployed 783 imprisoned firefighters while Los Angeles county fights multiple out-of-control blazes fueled by extreme winds and dry conditions. The incarcerated crews are embedded with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection and its nearly 2,000 firefighters, who have been stretched thin from several simultaneous emergencies.
Prisoners’ work is especially dangerous because unlike their “professional” counterparts, they are typically sent to the frontlines, using their hands to create vegetation-free perimeters that stem the spread of fires. They get minimal training for this work and they earn as little as $2.90 a day. In November 2024, California and Nevada brought the question of banning the practice of using prisoners as unpaid labor to voters. Nevada’s voters approved the ban while California voters rejected Proposition 6 by 53%.
A 2018 Time investigation found that incarcerated firefighters are at a higher risk for serious injuries. They also are more than four times as likely to get cuts, bruises or broken bones compared to professional firefighters working the same fires. They were also more than eight times as likely to face injuries after inhaling smoke, ash and other debris compared with other firefighters.
While most inmates receive little to no pay “nationwide, incarcerated workers produce more than $2 billion a year in goods and commodities and over $9 billion a year in services for the maintenance of the prisons where they are warehoused,” a 2022 joint report from the ACLU and The University of Chicago’s Global Human Rights Clinic found.
Reliance on workers who have very restricted to no choice to do this work not only exploits incarcerated workers, but also incentivizes states to keep workers incarcerated. During the Covid 19 pandemic many governors reduced the sentences of inmates or released non-violent offenders to increase physical space in the prisons. This inadvertently decreased the number of available firefighters. Budget cuts to programs that train inmates to fight fires added to the shortage of workers.
In a letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom on June 21, Los Angeles County Supervisors Lindsey Horvath and Kathryn Barger voiced concerns about deeper cuts to the program that would have closed five training camps in the county, affecting more than 200 inmate firefighters.
“The implications of such cuts are dire,” the letter read in part. “As you are aware, California faces a critical shortage of wildland firefighting hand crews, a situation that has been exacerbated by the increasing frequency and severity of wildland fires due to climate change.”
We Need A System that Protects Us, NOT Causes Fatal Disasters.
Labor Network for Sustainability is committed to building a world that takes the climate crisis seriously. We are part of movements that are pushing our governments to invest in the renewable energy transition necessary to mitigate further climate catastrophe. We are in solidarity with the labor movement that is fighting for fully funded services that can handle the disasters we can no longer prevent – thanks to decades of putting corporate profit over workers and our planet. We know this work needs to be well-trained and well-paid — not forced on the most vulnerable people in our society for little or no pay. We uplift those organizations racing to meet the immediate needs of destroyed communities, but we need more than distribution systems for aid.
Join LNS in building a society where the work we do nourishes and protects our planet and all who live on it.