Outdoor workers risk their lives during heatwaves. How many will die before politicians finally act?

There’s been fury in Spain over the tragic death of a street cleaner. It’s not hard to imagine something similar playing out in the UK

Montse Aguilar was only 51 when she died. She lived in the El Poble-sec area of Barcelona – it translates from Catalan as “the dry village” – where she cared for her 85-year-old mother and sang in a local choir. For three years, she had worked as a city street cleaner for an outsourcing company, wearing a lime-green uniform – made, her family later said, from “100% polyester … a material used to make coats”.

On 28 June, her shift in the city’s Gothic Quarter began at 2.30pm and ended seven hours later. The temperature that day had reached more than 35C, which left workers like her exposed: Spain has a clearer system of regulations covering heat and work than a lot of other countries, but it is still full of gaps.

That afternoon, Aguilar had sent a friend a WhatsApp message: “Sorry for not answering sooner, it’s just been a really bad afternoon. Not just because of the shit [ie the rubbish], but I thought I was going to die. I’m getting pains in my arms, chest and neck, cramps.” She also seems to have told one of her managers about how awful she was feeling. When she returned home, she collapsed and hit her head. Attempts by paramedics to revive her were unsuccessful.

The reaction to Aguilar’s death has been furious. On 16 July, people marched behind banners that read: “Extreme heat is also workplace violence”. Street cleaners demanded better summer workwear and more breaks. They claimed that some of the most crucial new rules announced by local politicians and officials – supposedly to ensure that outdoor workers had breathable uniforms – had not been put into practice. By then, Aguilar’s family was readying legal action: if her autopsy showed she had died of heatstroke, her relatives said they would sue Aguilar’s employers and the city council.

After days of searing heat in the UK, it is not hard to imagine a version of this story happening in this country – and to see that, at the intersection of work and the climate crisis, there is already a huge tangle of increasingly urgent issues. As temperatures in this corner of northern Europe once again scrape the mid-30s, what must it be like to work in warehouses and factories with precious little ventilation, let alone air conditioning? How do builders and bike couriers cope? And what are working lives like in parts of the economy from which people completely avert their eyes?

In the heatwave that hit us a month ago, I was in Exmoor, where I saw a pizzeria tell its customers that for the sake of their kitchen staff, they had no choice but to temporarily shut. But as people were turned away, I kept thinking of the dark kitchens that supply many of the food-delivery companies concentrated in our cities: tiny workplaces baldly described in a report by the Royal Society for Public Health as “small boxes” where food is produced in a “dark, cramped and low paid environment which is frequently either too hot or too cold”.

Whereas European countries such as Belgium, Hungary and Slovenia have working regulations built around clear temperature limits, what passes for this country’s system of rules and regulations on work and heat is a very British mess of half-measures and mere recommendations. For those working indoors, official guidance suggests a minimum temperature of 16C, which falls to 13C if people are doing “physical work”. But neither hardened legislation nor small-print guidance specifies any maximum temperatures – nor, indeed, many comprehensive rules that cover people who work in the open air.

Health and safety legislation and industry-specific regulations offer some protection to workers outdoors in such trades as construction and railway maintenance. But there is an awful sense of the severity of extreme weather finding no reflection in the law.

From around the world, there is an ongoing torrent of stories highlighting tensions and problems that can easily be copied across to the working lives of people in any number of other countries. In South Korea, construction workers point out that as the air reaches 35C, concrete and asphalt intensify the heat even further, and tell journalists: “In a summer like this, we think every day that we may die.” In northern India, the city of Varanasi has recently seen dozens of delivery workers cut adrift by the companies they work for, after they took part in protests demanding heat safety measures. In stories such as these, there are glimmers of demands that will soon become globally inescapable – not just for drastically altered conditions, but radically different ways of living.

In the UK, there are signs of deepening political tensions that another hot summer could make explosive. Before last year’s election, Labour acknowledged that “in a number of sectors, working temperatures are regularly unacceptably high” and said it would commit to “modernising health and safety guidance with reference to extreme temperatures”. As part of her plans to upgrade workplace rights, Angela Rayner repeated the last pledge once her party was in government. The Health and Safety Executive is now working on measures that would allow workers to insist on new protections from heat, and make it obligatory for employers to carry out “heat stress assessments”.

Quite rightly, the trade unions want more. For the past few years, the TUC – supported by its big member organisations – has been pushing for a cut-off temperature in indoor workplaces of 30C, or 27C if people are doing strenuous jobs. It also demands much more flexible working, and outdoor shifts that sit either side of the middle of the day. But the signals from Whitehall seem maddeningly hesitant. Perhaps because of the government’s belief in sweeping away regulation and reducing red tape, its spokespeople insist there are “no plans to introduce a maximum workplace temperature”, while ministers bat away calls for legislation that would allow British workers to be sent home during extreme heat.

What is really striking is how awkwardly searing heat sits with views of work that are common across the political establishment. Human frailty, we are told, must be no barrier to getting a job. As evidenced by new rumblings about the pension age being raised to 68, the same logic is being applied to people in what used to be considered old age – which is precisely when sensitivity to heat can become fatal. This is an aspect of climate denial that is still completely overlooked, crystallised in glaring contrasts: between the wilting parcel-deliverer or ageing supermarket worker stoically pushing shopping trolleys across baking asphalt, and the politicians still failing to look ahead to a recalibration of work that will surely become inevitable much sooner than they think. As labour becomes ever more a matter of life and death, how could it be otherwise?

Cover photo:  Matt Kenyon/The Guardian