Use legal rights against workplace heat!

London Hazards leaflet aimed at bus drivers, download here

At the Ecosocialist Conference in London on 30 May, I ran a session called Preparing for a Heat Strike. I argued that the most fruitful focus for joint activity is to build the campaign by Heat Strike and London Hazards Centre campaign around hot buses.

Many attendees at the conference signed up to take part in a London Hazards Centre and Heat Strike initiative to campaign around hot buses. Temperatures on London buses can soar to over 40ºC, posing an serious and imminent risk of heat exhaustion. Every bus without sufficient air cooling is a potential catastrophe not only for the individual bus drivers but for every pedestrian and road user in the city.

The talk discussed the substantial but much underused rights we have in the UK under Health and Safety law.

Workers have a right under s.44 of the Employment Rights Act to refuse unsafe work “without suffering detriment” if they have a “reasonable belief that it may cause a serious and imminent danger”. Employers have a legal duty under section 2 and 3 of the Health and Safety at Work Act to provide safe working conditions for their workers and any member of the public affected by their work. The TUC argues there should be a maximum working temperature of 30ºC (27ºC for strenuous work). Risks of heat stroke and heat exhaustion escalate rapidly above these temperatures. Workers should feel confident to use these rights and force their employers to make the necessary adaptations.

Legal Right

Health and safety reps are the only trade union reps with a legal right to paid time off for union duties. These duties include the right to inspect the workplace, investigating hazards of the representative’s own choosing. Under Health and Safety Executive guidance, management have a duty to facilitate private conversations between reps and individual workers during these inspections.

In most workplaces the health and safety structures are hollowed out and it is very easy to be elected as a new health and safety rep. Anyone wishing to organise around the heat strike idea can use these rights to organise on the bosses’ time.

The s44 right is an individual right and unions are nervous about any appearance of organising collective action around it for fear of legal repercussions. Unite has issued a letter to bus drivers explaining these rights. But without some collective organisation it is unlikely that individual workers will take the initiative. London Hazards Centre is hoping through leafletting drivers and passengers across London to build that collective organisation.

Range

There was a good range of trade union activists at the event and a useful discussion about how to progress this campaign. Workers in other industries can use the dangers of travelling on overheated public transport to argue for heat furlough, work from home arrangements, or flexible hours. Activists stressed the need to engage union-sponsored Labour MPs and demand representation on this issue.

Fast food workers and delivery drivers in the USA and Italy have walked out over extreme heat. Bus drivers in Rome and Naples have refused to drive hot buses. In Barcelona last year, hundreds of workers participated in a union demonstration following the death of street cleaner, Monse Aguilar, who died of heat exhaustion. They marched behind the banner “Extreme heat is workplace violence”. Even last week, there were reports of London Underground drivers refusing to drive trains.

Organising to force employers to act on heat is a way we can link immediate and deeply felt issues of workplace safety with the wider goal of building a working class movement capable of halting global warming.

As capitalism drives us ever deeper into the Anthropocene, the world and hence our workplaces will become ever more unsafe. We saw this very clearly during the pandemic and we saw it with the May heatwave too.

These escalating risks are not only bad for individual workers but they also undermine the essential services that we all depend upon. In 2021 the government’s own Climate Change Committee reported that progress with climate adaptation is either “too slow, has stalled or is heading in the wrong direction”. Five years of inaction later, it’s so much worse.

The experience of the pandemic has given us a lesson in how the capitalist class will respond to our deteriorating environmental conditions. They will load the burden of suffering onto the working-class and the poor. The will seek so far as possible to socialise the losses and privatise the gains. This is why they have done nothing on climate mitigation and why they have done almost nothing on climate adaptation.

But the pandemic also demonstrated the power we have as workers when we organise and are prepared to take collective action. The battle for Anthropocene resilient workplaces is a new site of struggle and workers are already taking collective action.

For a few weeks each year the issue of workplace heat impacts very large numbers of workers simultaneously, across industries and across borders and it is a problem that is not going to go away. Each summer we face the prospect of longer and hotter heatwaves until the point we build the social force that can wrest the power over economic life out of capitalist hands. Each group of workers who take action now has a good chance of success and each success may inspire other workers. In this way, organising around workplace heat not only makes us safer but also helps build the movement we need to tackle the climate crisis.

Representatives

The Ecosocialism conference on 30 May was an good initiative and drew a friendly and interesting crowd, including a representatives from a variety of different socialist traditions, Green party activists and a few trade union militants.

The dominant politics of the event was anticapitalist rather than positively socialist. Everyone seemed to agree that capitalism was the underlying driver of the climate and ecological emergency but ideas about positive solutions were varied.

Greens Organise people (in matching T-shirts) were prominent throughout expounding a kind of Green reformism and brought NGO vibes to the event. They were obviously buoyed by recent electoral success but less clear on how to use their position given the limited power and resources of local government.

The key organisers, Anti-Capitalist Resistance, created comradely forums for debate and did bring some more traditional socialist ideas like public ownership and planning to the conference agenda. There was a useful session on planning as a transitional demand highlighting different struggles across Europe. But there was no sense that ACR were trying to win an argument or cohere the conference around an ideologically coherent vision.

Eclecticism was built into the conference agenda. Throughout the conference there was a muted argument between those, like science writer Fred Pearce, who talked up China’s green credentials. and those with a more realistic assessment of the world’s biggest emitter.

Workers’ Liberty activists attended and argued for our class struggle socialist politics. In various sessions, our people made the case that the organised working-class is the only social force with the power and interest to take capitalist property into public ownership and start the green transition that we need.

The eclecticism made it difficult to pull conference delegates together on for collective activity. Greens Organise were enthusiastic about people joining the Greens but there was also lots of vague NGO talk of “coalition building” and “engaging with community groups”. Two hundred committed ecosocialists could achieve a lot through collective ideological and political struggle e.g. around demands for public ownership and planning. But disperse that force into “engaging with community groups” and it will achieve little.

• More here: What alliances?