We meet Rashida Baptiste at a Ponce City Market food court in Atlanta, though she apologetically explains we can't sit outside on the rooftop. It's 11 AM on a June morning in 2036, and the heat index is already pushing 105. She's wearing what she calls her "organizing uniform": a bright yellow t-shirt that says "HEAT KILLS / ORGANIZE" and comfortable sneakers.

At 33, she's co-director of the Atlanta Heat Justice Coalition, a position that didn't exist when she graduated law school in 2027. Back then, she imagined a career in corporate law. Instead, she's spent the last four years building what might be the South's most effective labor coalition around climate adaptation. And she's doing it for delivery drivers, warehouse workers, and outdoor service employees who most people assumed were impossible to organize.

This conversation has been lightly edited for a publication that exists in 2025, though Rashida and her work exist in a plausible 2036. Consider this a dispatch from a future that's already taking shape in workplace heat deaths, failed federal policy, and the slow realization that workers will have to save themselves.

How did a corporate law track turn into this?

Rashida: Oh god, the corporate law thing. So I graduated Emory Law in 2027, did the BigLaw summer associate thing, had the offer, the whole path. Then I did some pro bono work through the school's clinic. Just a few cases representing gig workers who'd been injured on the job.

One guy, delivery driver, had a heat stroke in his van. No AC, no break policy that actually worked, just this algorithm telling him he was falling behind on deliveries. He survived, but his kidneys were fucked. The company's position was basically: independent contractor, assumed the risk, not our problem.

I won that case, actually. Small settlement, but we won. And I remember thinking: I'm about to spend my career helping corporations avoid liability for exactly this kind of thing.

The cognitive dissonance was... I couldn't do it. So I didn't take the offer. My parents thought I'd lost my mind.

What was Atlanta like for outdoor workers in 2032 when you started organizing?

Rashida: Brutal. Getting worse fast. We'd have these stretches in summer where it was over 100 degrees with humidity for weeks at a time. June through September, really. The city had started issuing heat advisories that were basically like "don't go outside unless you have to," but of course thousands of people had to because their jobs required it. Delivery drivers, construction workers, landscapers, parking enforcement, all the gig app workers.

Georgia still doesn't have a statewide heat protection standard. Neither does the federal government, actually. OSHA's been "working on it" since 2021.¹ So you had this massive gap where workers in the fastest-growing employment sectors had zero protection. Companies would say "oh, we care about safety" and then their algorithms would penalize you for taking breaks.

How do you organize workers who aren't technically employees?

Rashida: That's the whole game, right? The gig companies spent billions making sure their workers weren't classified as employees specifically to avoid this kind of organizing.

But we figured out you don't actually need traditional union structure if you build the right coalition.

We started with something simple: a heat incident reporting system. Just a way for workers to document when they felt unsafe, when they had symptoms, when the app penalized them for taking shade breaks. We built it as a simple web form because we knew the companies would try to ban it if it was an app.

Within six months we had thousands of reports. Patterns everywhere. Certain zones in Atlanta where temperatures were consistently higher, certain times of day where the algorithms pushed hardest, certain company policies that were clearly dangerous.

Then we did something kind of brilliant, if I can say that. We partnered with Grady Hospital and Emory's public health school to analyze the data. Turned our worker reports into a legitimate epidemiological study. Published it. Got media coverage.

Did the companies respond?

Rashida: laughs Oh, they responded. They called us "anti-innovation activists" and said we were trying to destroy flexible work. One company literally ran ads saying we wanted to take away people's side hustles.

But what they couldn't do: they couldn't argue with the heat stroke hospitalizations. They couldn't argue with the data showing their algorithms pushed harder on the hottest days. And they really couldn't argue when we got the city council involved.

Atlanta's mayor at the time was getting pressure because the city was trying to market itself as a climate refuge for people leaving Florida and the Gulf Coast. Hard to do that when your gig workers are collapsing from heat stress. So we got the city to pass a local ordinance requiring any company operating in Atlanta to provide heat protections: mandatory breaks, access to cooling, algorithm transparency during heat advisories.

That seems like a big win for a local ordinance.

Rashida: It was!

And it wasn't.

The companies sued immediately, said it was preempted by federal law, violated interstate commerce, all the usual bullshit. We spent two years in court. But during those two years, workers saw that organizing could actually do something. Even if the ordinance was tied up in court, we'd proven we could fight back. Membership in the coalition went from maybe 3,000 workers to over 40,000.

And we started doing direct action. You know those viral videos from 2034 of delivery drivers just... stopping during heat waves? Parking their vans in front of company headquarters? That was us. We called it "Heat Strikes." Not technically legal strikes since they weren't employees, but what were the companies going to do? Fire 40,000 contractors in the middle of a labor shortage?

So you won?

Rashida: We won some things.

The ordinance survived the legal challenge in 2035. Turned out the conservative Supreme Court was willing to let cities regulate worker safety even for gig workers. That was honestly shocking. I think even they realized the heat situation was getting too extreme to ignore.

Now Atlanta has real protections. Mandatory 15-minute breaks every two hours when heat index tops 95. Access to cooling stations. Algorithm transparency. Companies have to disclose how their systems account for heat.

And the big one: if a worker reports heat symptoms, they can't be penalized for stopping work. That last one took three years to win.

What about other cities?

Rashida: That's the frustrating part. We've helped groups organize in Charlotte, Birmingham, Nashville, Memphis. Some wins, some losses. Texas is a nightmare. The state actually preempted cities from passing heat protections after Austin tried.³ Florida's even worse. And the federal government still hasn't done shit.

But workers know they can organize around this now. We've trained organizers in 30 cities. We've built a model that works. And the companies know they're vulnerable. They spent a decade telling everyone that gig work was the future, that flexibility was worth the tradeoffs.

Turns out when the tradeoff is heat stroke, people aren't so flexible.

Do you ever think about what you'd be doing if you'd taken that corporate law job?

Rashida: long pause

Yeah. Sometimes. I'd probably be making four times what I make now. I'd have paid off my loans by now instead of still chipping away at them. My mom would be able to brag about me at church without having to explain what a "labor coalition" is.

But I also think about that delivery driver, the first case. His name was Marcus. He was 28 when he had the heat stroke. He can't work anymore. The kidney damage was too severe. He's on disability now, probably for life.

How many Marcuses are there? How many people whose lives got permanently altered because we decided that app-based convenience was more important than human bodies?

I don't regret it. But I'm also not going to pretend it's been easy or that we've fixed everything. We're basically building worker protections from scratch in the middle of a climate crisis, fighting companies with infinite legal budgets, in states that are actively hostile to labor organizing.

Some days it feels impossible.

What keeps you going?

Rashida: The wins, honestly. Every time we get a contract signed, every time a worker tells me they took a break during a heat wave and didn't get penalized, every time another city passes protections.

And the community. We've built something real. Not just a coalition but a network of people who take care of each other. Workers share cooling strategies, look out for each other, cover routes when someone needs to tap out.

Also spite. laughs

I'm not going to let these companies win. They made billions telling workers they were "entrepreneurs" and "independent" while stripping away every protection. Someone has to fight back. Might as well be us.

What do you wish someone had told you in 2027 when you were deciding whether to take that corporate job?

That every sector is going to face this. Not just outdoor workers. Warehouse workers. Office workers when the AC fails. Everyone. And that the people who figure out how to build power for workers in this new reality are going to be the ones who actually shape what adaptation looks like.

Also that you can't do this work alone. I thought I could be a solo labor lawyer, taking cases, winning settlements. But this work requires building coalitions, building power collectively. The companies are too big, the crisis is too big. You need a movement.

She checks her phone

I've got to run. Meeting with organizers from the airport workers' union. They're dealing with tarmac heat exposure issues and want to coordinate strategy.

But hey, if you know any law students who are thinking about corporate law... send them my way. We could use more people who know how to read contracts and aren't afraid of a fight.

Footnotes

1. https://www.nrdc.org/bio/juanita-constible/2024-resolution-osha-propose-workplace-heat-standard ↩

2. https://www.who.int/news/item/22-08-2025-who-wmo-issue-new-report-and-guidance-to-protect-workers-from-increasing-heat-stress ↩

3. https://www.nrdc.org/bio/juanita-constible/workers-need-protection-deadly-heat ↩