Outdoor workers risk their lives during heatwaves. How many will die before politicians finally act? | John Harris
MOntse Aguilar was only 51 years old when she died. She lived in the district of El Poble -Sec in Barcelona – this translates to the Catalan by “the dry village” – where she took care of her 85 -year -old mother and sang in a local choir. For three years, she had worked as a street cleaner in the city for an outsourcing company, bearing a lemon green uniform – made, her family said later, from “100% polyester … A material used to make coats”.
On June 28, his quarter of work in the city’s Gothic district started at 2:30 p.m. and ended seven hours later. The temperature of this day had reached more than 35 ° C, which left workers as it exposed: Spain has a clearer system of regulations covering heat and work that many other countries, but it is always full of gaps.
This afternoon, Aguilar sent a message to a friend Whatsapp: “Sorry for not responding earlier, it was a very bad afternoon. Not just because of shit [ie the rubbish]But I thought I was going to die. I feel pain in my arms, my chest and my neck, cramps. She also seems to have told one of the managers of the way she felt horrible.
The reaction to the death of Aguilar was furious. On July 16, people walked behind banners who read: “extreme heat is also violence at work”. Street cleaners have required better summer clothes and more breaks. They said that some of the new most crucial rules announced by politicians and local officials – supposedly to ensure that outdoor workers had breathable uniforms – had not been put into practice. Until then, Aguilar’s family was preparing legal action: if her autopsy showed that she had died of a heat stroke, her relatives declared that they would pursue the Employers of Aguilar and the Municipal Council.
After days of hot heat in the United Kingdom, it is not difficult to imagine a version of this story that happens in this country – and to see that, at the intersection of labor and the climate crisis, there is already a huge tangle of increasingly urgent problems. While temperatures in this corner of northern Europe once again gave the mid-1930s, how should it be to work in warehouses and factories with a small precious ventilation, not to mention air conditioning? How do the manufacturers and bicycle letters face? And what do professional life look like in certain parts of the economy from which people completely avoid your eyes?
In the heat wave that struck us a month ago, I was in Exmoor, where I saw a pizzeria tell his customers that for their kitchen staff, they had no choice but to temporarily close. But as people were refused, I thought of the thinking of dark kitchens which provide many food delivery companies concentrated in our cities: tiny workplaces described in a report by the Royal Society for Public Health as “small boxes” where food is produced in a “dark, cramped and uncompromising environment which is often too hot or too cold”.
While European countries such as Belgium, Hungary and Slovenia have work regulations built around clear temperature limits, which passes for the system of rules and regulations of this country on work and heat is a very British mess of half-measures and simple recommendations. For those who work inside, official advice suggest a minimum temperature of 16C, which falls at 13c if people do “physical work”. But neither a legislation hardened nor from the directive directives specifies any maximum temperature – nor, in fact, many complete rules which cover people who work outdoors.
Health and security legislation and industry -specific regulations provide some protection to workers outside in businesses such as the construction and maintenance of railways. But there is a terrible sense of the severity of extreme weather conditions finding no reflection in law.
From all over the world, there is a torrent during stories highlighting tensions and problems that can easily be copied in the professional life of people in a number of other countries. In South Korea, construction workers emphasize that air reaches 35 ° C, concrete and asphalt intensify even more heat and say to journalists: “In a summer like this, we think every day that we can die.” In northern India, the city of Varanasi has recently seen dozens of deliveries drifting by companies for which they work, after having participated in demonstrations requiring thermal security measures. In such stories, there are glimmer of requests that will soon become worldwide worldwide – not only for radically modified conditions, but radically different lifestyles.
In the United Kingdom, there are signs of deepening political tensions that another hot summer could explode. Before last year’s elections, the workforce recognized that “in a certain number of sectors, work temperatures are regularly unacceptably high” and said that it would commit to “modernize health and safety advice in reference to extreme temperatures”. As part of her plans to upgrade working rights, Angela Rayner repeated the last commitment once her party was in government. The Health and Security Executive is currently working on measures that would allow workers to emphasize new heat protections and make employers compulsory to carry out “thermal stress assessments”.
Rightly so, unions want more. In recent years, the TUC – supported by its large member organizations – has been pressure for a cut -off temperature in interior workplaces of 30C or 27c if people make painful jobs. It also requires much more flexible work and outdoor changes that are on each side of the day. But Whitehall’s signals seem exasperatingly hesitant. Perhaps because of the government’s belief by sweeping the regulations and reducing administrative formalities, its spokespersons insist that it is not planned to introduce a maximum workplace temperature “, while the ministers beat the calls for legislation which would allow British workers to be returned to them during extreme heat.
What is really striking is how awkwardly the heat is burning with work views that are common in the political establishment. Human fragility, we are told, should not be an obstacle to obtaining a job. As evidenced by new rumbles on the age of the 68 -year -old pension, the same logic is applied to people in what was formerly considered an old age – which is precisely when heat sensitivity can become fatal. This is an aspect of climate denial which is always completely neglected, crystallized by flagrant contrasts: between the distributor of wilting packets or the aging supermarket which pushes store trolleys through pastry asphalt, and politicians still do not think so. While work is becoming more and more a matter of life and death, how could it be otherwise?
