The Covid-19 pandemic provides a good illustration of the class clashes over health and safety at work which I discussed in Solidarity 707. Most employers provided some PPE and changes to working practices which cost them very little. Some even felt compelled to introduce engineering controls in the form of air cleaning technology or improved ventilation. But efforts to eliminate the risk by minimising the chance of infectious people entering our workplaces were nearly non-existent.
An estimated 12 million key workers, including a large number of health and social care workers, went through the pandemic without adequate sick pay and so could not afford to isolate. Safety reps like myself in countless workplaces have provided their employers with verbatim evidence of workers explaining how they could not afford to follow public health rules on isolation for want of occupational sick pay.
In the Covid high days, also, the profits of Big Pharma took priority over an effective world vaccine programme. Billions of largely Black and Asian people have still been denied a vaccine.
Beyond Covid-19, the risk of zoonotic spillover and future pandemics continues to increase as agribusiness and extractive industry further encroach into the last remaining wild places increasing the chance of human contact with unknown pathogens. The growth and intensification of factory farming further heightens the risk of future pandemics.
At every stage simple evidence-based measures would control the risk; at every stage the profit motive militates against them.
Over climate change, in the immediate term, the battle will be around workplace adaptations.
Outdoor workers in the UK already have a right to be provided with suncream and other PPE to protect from intense UV radiation and extreme heat. The battle for climate adaptations to make our working environments and practices safe in a warming world extends beyond PPE, to measures such as changes to building design and working patterns to ensure thermal comfort in heatwaves, and effective emergency procedures for managing flooding and other extreme weather events.
Beyond the workplace, elimination involves winning a society that can organise the essential work that needs to be done to transition the energy, transport, mining, agriculture, manufacturing and waste management sectors onto an ecologically sustainable basis.
The movement against climate change has until now been a largely middle class movement with often radical but eclectic politics. For decades it has been a movement of people who took a special interest in ecology, were alarmed by what they saw coming in the future, but lacked an effective lever for social change so have been restricted to noisy street protest to “raise awareness”.
But in the workplaces, the logic of workers’ struggle for climate safety can extend beyond adaptation to mitigation and beyond the struggle for workers’ control in the workplace to workers’ power in society at large.