Keeping it safe when it’s hot

Nobody is happy about the temperature hitting 34 degrees. Not while they’re at work, anyway. The ticket hall in our station has machine rooms on either side, meaning station staff are sandwiched in the middle of radiating heat, with little circulation to bring cooler air in as we stand there for hours in a row helping thousands of passing customers.

A barista at the coffee shop next to the station is from the Middle East, but when I visit for an iced coffee she complains that unlike the buildings and infrastructure back home, Britain is not designed for the heat. If that’s true in the air-conditioned coffee shops, it’s certainly true of the Victorian era underground stations that still have asbestos in the walls.

M hasn’t worked at the station for much longer than I have, and we’re both strategising. We search Amazon, discuss wearable fans that wouldn’t look too obtrusive on our uniform, which drinks cool you down best (iced, not chilled), and how to do our duties while expending as little energy as possible. When walking along the hot platforms, do you rush, to get it over with faster, or go as slowly as you can, to try and keep the body temperature low? Unfortunately, we have lots of opportunities to experiment, and neither option is good.

There are real consequences here, beyond the patch of sweat spreading across the back of my uniform. If a passenger falls on the tracks, staff have to make a judgement call in a matter of seconds to identify the best way to stop an oncoming train and prevent deaths. Lethargy and distraction are real factors that inhibit our ability to do that task effectively.

Thanks to the Heat Strike campaign, I have some ready-made examples of how we might change things. Bus drivers in London and Manchester have been recording temperatures in their cabs, and when they hit above 40 degrees, they’ve been demanding to stop work on grounds of risking their own safety. If it hits the high thirties later this summer, as it has for every year in memory, there’s no chance the station doesn’t get that hot, too. I show coworkers pictures of thermometers at workplaces up and down the country, and we talk about how there should be a maximum working temperature.

We’re a little luckier than bus drivers: we have mess rooms with air conditioning, and there’s usually enough of us at any one time to allow for people to switch out and cool off for a few minutes. But the number of staff on the station has been shrinking for years now, and the basic requirements to keep the station functioning come into direct conflict with the health and working conditions of the staff when more breaks are needed than usual to do our job properly. §