Our country among many others is experiencing an intense heat wave that has extended beyond the conventional heat wave belt. Several states and cities are registering unusually high temperatures for this time of the year. Temperature in the 40s with concurrent water crisis is making work involving exposure to the heat, especially manual labour not just difficult but life-threatening at times. The ILO estimates that South Asia alone may lose as much as 5.3% of work hours, which corresponds to 43 lakh full-time jobs by 2030 due to heat and humidity, with India alone losing about 5.8% of its total work hours. This is accentuated by our predominant reliance on the informal sector. This impacts the economy as a whole.
The Supreme Court of India recently ruled that people have the right to be free from adverse effects of climate change under Article 14 (the fundamental right to equality) and Article 21 (right to life and personal liberty) of the Constitution. This judgment is crucial as it recognises the differential risk of climatic shocks to different communities as well as their differential capacity to adapt to the shocks.
The Union Government also issued advisories to state governments to direct industries and employers under their jurisdiction to make enough provisions for welfare of workers’ during the heat wave. The advisories are issued in the form of non-binding guidelines that recommend increased intake of water, enabling provision of shade, increasing frequency of breaks for workers, and restriction of physical work during peak sun time, among others. Globally workplace adaptation is being divided broadly into two categories: (i) adaptation for outdoor and non-cooled workplaces; and (ii) adaptation for indoor and cooled workplaces. In case of outdoor (such as construction, agriculture, transport) or non-cooled workplaces such as factories, warehouses, experts recommend shorter shifts with more breaks, and more night work. On the other hand, for indoor work, cooling the workspaces is being offered as an option along with recommendation of increasing remote work, hybrid work, four-day work weeks and six hour workdays.
Are these viable solutions?
Let us consider a construction or a factory worker in India. A workers has to work at least 8 hours a day to earn the minimum wage, which barely covers their family expenses. Thus in most cases where overtime wage is paid, workers choose to work longer hours for the additional pay, even at the risk of their own health. Wage in most employments are linked also to productivity. For example, in the garment factories in sweltering Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, workers, are given such high hourly production targets that workers cannot even take normal water, toilet or lunch breaks. Providing increased frequency of breaks for drinking more water and longer breaks to recover from exhaustion would require employers readjusting their production targets, which is intrinsically linked to their cost of production and profitability. Thus climate crisis cannot be addressed without adjusting the nature of production, within the model of development.
In informal workplaces, such as construction sites, etc lack of access to potable drinking water and toilets often force women to consume less water even during heat waves. The new-age gig delivery and service workers crisscross the city in scorching heat and even at night to earn their living. The choice before workers is between risking their health and ensuring their sustenance.
If we consider the recommendation for shorter work hours a day and more night work, this has the potential to severely impact work-life balance and will affect women more disproportionately than men as they carry the burden of care work at home too. In event of this household chores may get transferred to children at home. Additionally, in a severely labour surplus economy, with a large majority of workers employed at best at minimum wages, there will always be innumerable workers willing to risk their health for basic sustenance rendering these feel-good strategies without any concurrent mechanism to compensate loss in wages to non-solutions. In this regard, we could consider the initiative of the Delhi government for construction workers during the imposition of the ban on construction in Delhi to reduce air pollution. The government ensured a wage compensation for all registered construction workers from the Construction Workers’ Welfare Board. This was possible due to the availability of the huge pool of unspent funds in the Board reserve which provided a dedicated and sustainable social security net for the workers.
According to a Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), rapid urbanisation and widening socio-economic inequalities together is increasing the possibility of multiple climatic and non-climatic risks. The increased price of food and water due to climate induced scarcity is pushing large section of working people to malnutrition and climate-related illnesses. This also indicates that to mitigate such a multi-dimensional problem, government intervention is essential to ensure equity. How governments function today thus needs to change. The prescription of minimum government and increased role of the private sector in the development of an economy also requires restructuring if we still want our children to survive in this planet.
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