For the last two months reports of the effects on workers of extreme heart have been coming from all over the world starting with the Arab Gulf where migrant workers face dangerous conditions despite seasonal midday work bans. Workers reported inadequate access to drinking water, shaded rest areas and medical care. Fixed calendar-based working restrictions fail to reflect increasingly early and hotter summers. Similar conditions existed across Asia. In Bangladesh labour laws require workplaces to maintain a “reasonable temperature” there are no mandatory heat stress standards. India is experiencing the hottest temperatures in the world. According to the worker-sympathetic Lancet in its Countdown on Health and Climate Change, 247 billion labour hours in the country where large parts of the economy are dependent on physical labour ─agriculture, construction and manufacturing─ were lost in 2024 while a study by the distinctly unsympathetic McKinsey Consultancy estimates that up to 4.5% of India’s GDP is likely to be lost from rising heat and humidity by 2030. The “heat domes” over Europe has prompted the European Trade Union Confederation to press the European Commission to set maximum working temperatures as law. And with reference to the football World Cup called for cooling breaks.
The Firestone tyre oligopoly’s rubber plantation in Liberia is the largest contiguous rubber plantation in the world at 185 square miles. Most of the eight thousand workers and their families live on the plantation in Firestone-provided housing evocative of dilapidated public housing in poor inner-city US neighbourhoods. Their children are born in Firestone hospitals and attend Firestone schools on the plantation. The workers are all Liberian while upper management is primarily white Americans. No Firestone tires are produced in the country; Firestone uses the Liberian workers to extract the latex, package it up, and send it off to other countries for production. This plantation however was recently the scene of a momentous union victory. Facing rampant subcontracting ─which like outsourcing is a basic oligarchic strategy to prevent collective worker power─ the Firestone Agricultural Workers Union of Liberia (FAWUL) confronted the practice head-on and won a union election among the plantation’s four thousand subcontracted workers; and this past December, they secured their first collective bargaining agreement.
In Pakistan organised calls for justice and stronger occupational safety protections for workers are being made after a series of fatal incidents involving sanitation workers in Punjab province. Three Christian workers were killed in separate accidents after inhaling toxic gases inside a sewer, while another worker remains in critical condition. Reports say that workers were sent into hazardous sewer environments without protective equipment, oxygen masks or safety kits. Rights groups say that the cases reflect entrenched religious discrimination and systemic exploitation, as sanitation workers in Pakistan – many of whom are from marginalised Christian communities – frequently face unsafe conditions, lack of protection and occupational neglect. In India fatalities among “low-caste” Dalits doing the same work are frequent.