When heat kills – The effects of climate change on workers | DW Documentary

When heat kills – The effects of climate change on workers | DW Documentary

Scientists have warned that Rising global temperatures will increase the risk of people suffering heat stress it’s already a big issue for those who work Outside Beneath the scorching Sun two peasants take a break while working a field it’s hard hot Work the Pastoral setting makes an obvious Point heat and War work never did mix Well when van go painted this work in 1889 the world had already unconsciously started a new climate Age the age of unprecedented global warming the most recent years have been the warmest that have ever been on Record climate change is threat ing the health of millions of workers who are directly exposed to the Heat what’s more it reduces their productivity and brings into question the conventional model of growth to always produce more Faster the warming climate is reaching an insurmountable limit the bounds set by the human body can we keep working as we always have in a hotter world and at what price temperature record that’s an old one it’s open only on one side and has no AC that’s even worse

The driver said it felt like it was 50° in the cab no wonder it’s like a greenhouse in there what was it in there like a sauna 98% oxygen saturation heart rate 79 two experts are here as part of a joint project by the Italian government and the nonprofit organization en

They’re trying to safeguard against the effects of heat in the workplace taking a picture with the thermal camera their job is to assess the health risks the heat poses for Italian workers this measures your heart rate exhaustion hi and sometimes I’m dizzy mild yes it’s hot very hot and if bad weather

Is forecast there’ll be storms right away working like this is hard we’re feeling climate change a little bit more each year each year in Italy more than 4,000 work accidents are attributed to excessive Heat anyone who works outdoors is the first to be exposed to the risks of longer and hotter Summers at first you start sweating if you sweat too much you get dehydrated and lose minerals that can cause cramps tiredness and confusion and in the worst cases loss of consciousness or heat stroke then you have to act fast to prevent tragic situations where the heat can kill these

Workers this man is suffering from heat stress his heart needs to beat faster to transport the heat to the skin where it will be dissipated through Sweat the higher the humidity the less sweat evaporates and the faster the heartbeats to compensate as a natural reaction the body attempts to reduce physical activity to keep the heart rate stable if that’s at all possible the man here was under severe physiological stress and was wearing clothing that hindered sweating his

Heart rate R sharply to nearly 140 beats per minute the reason the heart is working so hard is because of thermo regulation trying to keep the body’s temperature around 37° when it rises it’s like a car without a radiator it overheats the engine keeps getting hotter and hotter till it

Stops the sun sets Simple Rules it forces the body to slow down but workers aren’t just subject to the laws of nature the articles in today’s paper what does it say he started feeling ill in the Sun and died on the roof of a hanger a worker from

Romania that was yesterday that was yesterday a father of four children it was likely a heart attack yesterday was the time to act we’re too late today now we’ve got to read this awful news of a Romanian who leaves behind a family of four children and just because he went to

Work it’s just hard to imagine how such a thing could happen it just shouldn’t be 10 workers in Italy died from heat exposure in the summer of 22 in France seven people died on the job also likely as a result of increasing temperatures a year later the summer of

2023 was once again the hottest summer recorded in the northern hemisphere since records began in some parts of the world hot humid weather already has workers struggling at their physical limits At the current rate of global warming this Mark could be surpassed in the next 50 Years the world’s hotspots are giving us a taste of what’s likely to come summer temperatures in Qatar are regularly higher than 45° C in recent decades the country’s climate has heated up at a rate almost twice the global average at the same time the Emirate is undergoing unprecedented

Development gatar has gone from a country with a small Capital to a place that has in less than a decade created itself as a global destination for sports and culture construction and Kat is at the technological Cutting Edge it is some of the most sophisticated uh Innovative ambitious Construction and

Design anywhere in the world the whole country is a construction site and many businesses tout their technical Mastery building ever higher and quicker under extreme Conditions Kat relies on migrant workers to realize these lofty Plants 94% of the country’s workers are foreign most come from the Indian subcontinent southeast Asia and Africa Low-wage workers who despite the Emirates recent reforms are still treated poorly by their employers workers were referred to by managers and others as not just unskilled but poor quality and just bodies Natasha isander is one of the few independent researchers who received approval to visit Qatari construction

Sites for almost a year the professor of urban planning closely observed the daily life of the construction workers I asked workers uh consistently what was the most difficult part of their job um they never described uh delay in the payment of wages they didn’t refer to long hours

They didn’t refer to degrading Behavior by their supervisors uniformly to a man they spoke about heat being the most difficult part of their jobs the men described it as a feeling of drowning that you drowning in the air that the the sky was melting and you couldn’t

Breathe or that the sky was pressing down on them it was for workers the most difficult dangerous and disempowering challenge that they felt at the work site bar But the way it acts on the body is often very difficult to discern the highest heat stress levels you actually have Direct effects also on the brain so the workers um cannot think say normally and that increases the risk of accidents uh and they might fall off a building

And die even because of the effect on the Brain When fan thaka returned home he couldn’t say anything about the working conditions in Qatar neither did his lifeless body betray what he was forced to bear in the [Laughter] [Applause] Heat every day in Nepal another Village Mourns the tragic death of one of these voiceless migrant [Laughter] workers My father worked for a construction company doing different types of jobs sometimes carpentry sometimes Plumbing he ended up doing all sorts of work forch when he called and told us about the working conditions he always complained about the heat he often told me about it on the

Phone how hard the heat was on Him fan thakur went to katar to earn money to pay for his daughter’s wedding and his son’s education he will never get to see his children grow Up a coworker of his called me and said your father is dead he told me that he was working high up and he had to repair a pipe and then he fell nobody was there when the accident happened some colleagues came a few minutes later and found him unconscious on the

Ground they took him to the hospital where he was pronounced dead fore speech the only official information Fan’s family has are a few words on his death certificate cause of death acute respiratory failure nothing indicates what might have caused him to stop breathing although they were told there would be further investigations the

Family has heard nothing since something that has become sadly a standard for guest workers from Nepal during the last decade the NGO Fair Square estimates that more than 3,000 nepes migrant workers have died in the Gulf States one out of every two cases remains unexplained officially it’s called acute respiratory or heart failure on paper a natural cause of death nobody knows like what natural death actually is you know our understanding of natural death is like you know when you are old days and when you die

Naturally that should be the natural death but then a 25 years old guy who is like medically certified by the government of Nepal as a you know uh as a healthy and a fit candidate for like doing all sort of manual jobs in the countries like Gulf you know like

Suddenly dies and nobody knows the reason this is a suspicious death we need to like investigate the Death every day500 Nepali migrant workers leave this country to countries like Gulf and Malaysia to find a proper job for themselves and a better life for the family Members the same International Airport welcomes the dead body of two to three migrant workers per day in average you know wrapped in the wooden Boxes did they fall victim to the extreme climate in the Gulf States was the real cause of death extreme heat Todd Krum is a leading expert on heat stress in 2019 he contributed to a study about suspicious deaths of nepales workers in Kar we actually looked at every month

Because if you look at the statistics over the whole year then you have cool months you have hot months and you actually can’t see the difference between the different parts of the years we could show in this research that during the hottest months the cardiovascular or the heart disease

Deaths were three to four times higher than during the coolest months and this could not be expected to happen from any other reason than the extreme heat that the workers were working in during the hot months for several years the the curve of fatalities was nearly parallel to the

Seasonal temperature curve the higher the temperature the more fatalities there were each winter things improved but then in the spring the numbers of deaths rose Again in response to criticism katar passed a law to protect workers from the Heat the government of Qatar has decided to forbid working Outdoors at certain times of day during the sums the law states that from June to September it’s forbidden to work outside from 10:00 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. at 10: a.m. sharp the work on the construction site of this company ends

They want to show us their in compliance with the rules employers are now required to have and Implement a prevention plan to combat the risks of heat stress now during the very very high heat times we have the black uh flag which means we stop all the works no

Matter what it’s the safety first and then we have the red flag which is the precaution saying that we are in the critical area which is 39 to 53° it means we need to make a 10minute rest per hour and then we have the yellow

Flag which is 32 to 38° which is 7 minutes per hour and then the green flag which is 27 to 31° it’s the normal working hours today under this conditions we have the red flag on this Plant the company recommends their workers take regular short breaks but it’s not a legal requirement qari authorities require employers to use a wbgt or wet bulb Globe thermometer showing more than just the temperature it supplies precise data to specifically show the heat stress that worker is being exposed to it monitors

Air temperature humidity wind speed and solar radiation according to International standards at 28° and upwards on a wbgt there is a health risk for even moderate physical activity and at above 32° wgb the risk of death increases sharply as you can see it’s right now 30.7 under this conditions and when it

Reaches 30.1 and raises Above This the SES are shut down so we no labors are allowed to work in our out as you can see it’s fluctuating depending on the Wind depending on the humidity it has many parameters okay so if we believe like now at 32 32 is still allowed do it

Still allowed we are at the edge and now now we need to stop which we stopped already yeah now it’s wind coming so it will change look immed with a little breeze it’s coming down it’s like a stock market isn’t it going up in on September 15th at 10:05 a.m. the

Heat in katar still poses a deadly threat to people working Outdoors even though the summer work regulations are soon coming to an end in the mornings companies can let their employees work outside without breaks as long as the wbgt limit of 32.1 De isn’t exceeded but the day is far from over

For the workers they have to wait in this air conditioned cafeteria until work starts again in 5 and 1/2 hours It is in some ways one of the most protective examples of heat legislation anywhere in the world however the legislation as is today does not fully protect workers it does not take into account that workers do not have the autonomy to self-pace they cannot exercise their

Right to rest as needed to cool down as needed the time pressures uh to complete this work are intensive and the supervisory pressures to work at an accelerated Pace how workers experience heat how they’re able to protect themselves from heat um and how they suffer harm from heat is absolutely a

Matter of power dynamics on the work side and this goes beyond whether or not companies are offering enough water points or cooling stations um it goes beyond That even with the most limited climate change by the end of the century there would be 100 million people living in areas with such heat as the hottest in Middle East at the moment and if we um assume that the temperature increase would continue at the rate that we are

Currently increasing it there would be 700 million people in the hottest areas if the planet warms by 2° C then 15 times more people worldwide will be exposed to extreme heat and Humidity it’s really hot in Nicaragua between March and may during these months the sugar cane Harvest is in full swing most men in this region work for the sugar industry those who are still alive at least for a few decades now an epidemic has been ravaging the ranks of outdoor

Workers it could be the first occupational disease caused by climate change the village of La Isla is surrounded by sugarcane fields it’s known as the island of Widows more than 300 women have lost their husbands here they all died of the same mysterious illness we didn’t have any other choice it was the only job when I saw how many people were dying of this disease I knew one day it would be my turn too Lots of my relatives have it too my brothers are also sick my younger brother has to have dialysis like me most of them were on the cane fields we all worked hard there she’d just been born then that’s me and that’s my daughter and this is the 38-year-old Nelson Martinez survived he

Suffers from chronic renal Failure three dialysis sessions each week have left their marks on his arm but they keep him alive we didn’t have any breakes or even any water I was sweating the whole time my shirt was soaked through my trousers too everything they pressured us hurry up Don’t Stop keep going who can work like

That I often saw how many co-workers fainted got fevers or threw up when they were in the field and then one the company said you can’t work here anymore you’re not allowed in first you slave away and then you’re nothing to them nothing at all Nelson would die within a few days

Without the dialysis and this treatment will extend his life by 15 years at best others in the region didn’t get the treatment at all in the neighboring town of chichigalpa over half of men’s deaths have been attributed to chronic renal Failure the residents have long since become used to the sight of the hearse just as they are of the trucks that take the sugar cane to the sugar plant of Industry giant San Antonio they produce close to half of Nicaraguan sugar and also the world famous rum Flor DEA San Antonio is the biggest employer in town in 2007 Jason Glasser witnessed a human tragedy at the gates of the company in chig galpa Glasser comes from the US he originally

Came to make a documentary about the banana industry this is it this is the situation about here yeah yeah but this feels about right it’s a long time ago the first encounter there was a protest Camp of banana workers in front of the National Assembly and they had

Told us to talk to these sugarcan workers that were there who told us we cane workers we’re dying you have to get up there this this kidney disease we think it’s pesticides we think you know something’s killing us uh please check it out so we came up here to check it

Out and we came across this completely Eerie scene these are the picket lines of the canefield workers a protest group in front of the gates a line of National Police in front of the gates and there had clearly been a a scuffle there’s some bloody faces and some unhappiness going On we set up an association four years ago 460 members of our group have died this is a horrific disease the Town Cemetery is already full we had to build a second one it’s a barbaric chaos here like what’s my problem what’s the problem tired so the cops it turned out took our

Information gave it to a private company security and the private company called their PR firm in Miami buron Marell and buron Marell called us in Nicaragua and told us there’s nothing to see here you should move on your way youngsters and we were like there’s clearly something to see

Here Jason Glasser stayed in chichigalpa for several months and documented the devastating extent of the illness and it was so omnipresent at that point the disease that it is no exaggeration to say that every single day there were one or more funerals and you start really wondering

Like what can I do like I can’t just go home you know so we have to do something Jason left his career as a documentary filmmaker so he could work to protect Harvest laborers he established an NGO La Isla got a master’s degree in epidemiology and gathered a team of researchers Together how many years have you been working with pesticides for 5 years for 5 years where do you get your drinking water from the city or from your own well I drink the Municipal Water okay from the city could you send me the next person please people would say it was from

Pesticides it was from herbicides it was from existing ground toxins it might be the volcano the volcano that only affected young working age men uh was it was in the water but the water only affected young working age men um it was about looking through epidemiological data physiological

Studies anecdotal reports what seems to be the through line and the commonality with who’s affected and how severely they’re affected and it all became very clear that the occupational setting was the main issue those doing the heaviest jobs were the sickest what are the working conditions

Like for cane Cutters what risks do they face laisla researchers recorded it all the monoculture sugar cane Fields extend over more than 32,000 hectares around gig galpa these plants can be refined to make white sugar that sweetens coffee or processed to use as biofuel in cars the cane Cutters are a vital Link

In this value creation chain so we’re going to head to uh one of the colonos which are the Farms that are sourcing the Sugar Mill the Sugar Mill owns about half their land and then they have a supply base that’s another half in I haven’t been to

A colono in over 2 years because of the pandemic so I don’t really know if there’s any tweaks or some education I know is gone on my guess is it’s going to be pretty bad but this is a nice shot showing the total lack of protection and

How hard these guys work and they’re just starting like you know in the morning they’re a little bit slower you know but 20 minutes in man they are clipping and they’re in a they’re in a rhythm and it just gets so fast but like we could be at the beach

In this heat and surfing and drinking some my TI and we’re not getting kidney disease we’re pro probably not going to have a heat stroke you know but what’s What’s Happening Here is they’re working so hard like by 7:00 a.m. about this time and their cemp is already in a

Danger zone above 38° C the heat doesn’t just come from the Sun but from the bodies of the Cutters as well their muscles are working at Full Steam they produce their own warmth on top of the ambient temperature working outside increases thermal stress which in turn further increases the difficulty of the

Work the Cutters take few breaks to drink and rest in the shade they’re paid by how much they can cut the pressure to work at top speed means the risk of renal damage is 12 times as high as it is for their overseers who are subject to the same

Climatic conditions P R’s really pernicious because your body is desperately telling you to relax to calm down but you have to survive you have to provide for your family so you’ll override all those signals an animal will take a break human being pushes on through there these Antiquated labor

Systems that are fundamentally based on slavery that have not evolved with the protections we expect in other settings and sectors this still existing Colonial system has ignored these climate conditions instead it pushes the widespread misconception that heat causes one to be lazy and there are two ways to deal with laziness either with

The carrot or the stick more than three decades ago in neighboring El Salvador a doctor sounded the alarm because of the extent of the epidemic we’ve got more than 6,000 dialysis patients in the country and we believe that for each one 10 to 15 people are in other stages of renal

Insufficiency if you do the math that’s Enormous cardo Leiva Marino is a nephologist and a senior doctor at the national Rosales Hospital in Salvador city he was one of the first doctors to take a closer look at the illness diabetes is the most common cause of chronic renal insufficiency worldwide followed by high blood

Pressure but at the end of the 1990s we saw more and more young male patients came from farming regions cotton was once farmed in these places but now the crop is sugar cane they didn’t fit in the international epidemiological profile because of its atypical profile the disease was named chronic kidney

Disease of non-traditional origin but the patients here call it C that’s because creatinine clearance is the blood test value that shows whether your kidneys are working or not these patients don’t have symptoms for many years and only come to the hospital when they’re in the advanced stages so practically when they’re at

The point of needing dialysis we cannot cure them once their renal insufficiency becomes Chronic one of our theories is that risk factors such as repeated heat stroke overwork and dehydration cause minor damage to the kidneys that goes unnoticed these people are likely used to hard work and don’t immediately notice what it’s doing to their health when they’re in these conditions

Over many years then that could be what’s causing this disease it’s estimated the epidemic has killed tens of thousands of people in the last two decades during the last 15 years it’s been observed in all Central American countries above all in regions with the highest temperatures and humidity

Levels right so the interesting thing about this map is you see the correlation between the disease and the hot regions in the lowlands where there’s the most intensive labor so if you look at the blue dots this is where you have like the really high-intensive and and dense cane production so this

Isn’t like some artisanal farm and where you see the red and yellow this is kind of the relative kidney disease burden on the health system of these countries but you do not see it in the highlands where there’s intensive labor where it’s cooler and you don’t see it where

There’s less intensive work in the hotlands so it’s just that intersection of extremely heavy labor and extremely high tempature es the epidemic coincides with the expansion of intensive agriculture in Central America which is being driven by Rising Global demand for agricultural products at the same time the climate

Has warmed by more than 1° C and the number of days of extreme heat during the Harvest has tripled so there’s some really nice work out of Costa Rica that looked going back to 1970 up to 2010 this area has gotten extremely hot over the last uh several decades and the job

Has changed it is no longer a job you do a couple weeks or a few weeks a year as a farmer and clear your own land you are now a laborer clearing other people’s land for months on end 6 to 7 days a week 12 hours a day and you see this pretty

Remarkable association between land under intensive sugarcane production uh over those 40 years and the mortality rate I think an epidemic related to climate and uh the inability for the marketplace to adapt to the new reality people have not adapted to how you need to treat your Workforce to deal with the

Changes the changes we’re seeing everywhere Now After years of denial and resistance the San Antonio company opens its door for Jason and his team the sugar processing plant finally admits the working conditions harm its laborers now with the NGO La Isla the company is working out a research and prevention program to combat heat stress I can

Really those hit hardest are Harvest workers who cut burnt sugar cane burning the crop makes it easier to cut but the ground is still hot this further increases the stress on the workers very strategies for protecting them are as effective as they are [Applause] Simple you know it’s rust shade and hydration but the really important part of it is that the rusts are mandated so you can be completely hydrated but be hypothermic mean meaning too much heat in your body and still have damage and that’s what people really didn’t understand they were conflating that for

Years so to have the mandated brakes to make sure that core temperature gets down and you can keep an average over the work day that’s more reasonable the Cutters take up to 20 minute breaks per hour and go home at noon the strictly regulated working Tempo was inspired by athletic

Training 3 years ago when we were just assessing it about 10% of these guys were going to the hospital every Harvest and know we’ve brought that down to like 0.5 or 0.1 like almost completely eliminated hospitalized acute kidney injury so we know that if you can stop

Acute kidney injury you can stop the disease hopefully in this tracks was this epidemic preventable could simple breaks and sufficient hydration have done the job La Isla’s research results support this but they also show that millions of workers worldwide are exposed to the same threat but as we expanded the network as

We increased the studies and we moved to different countries we began to see that really anywhere that was too hot and the work was too heavy and there were no protections who saw This here’s a data base that we have uh one person is a 33y old male yeah um and the other person is 36y old male and young we don’t know how long they have been on dialysis or like and they both left healthy yes and uh I have already

Jason Glasser has gone to Nepal to do more research he fears migrant workers from Nepal who have gone to work in the extreme heat of the Gulf States also have kidney damage his nepales research colleagues sua corala and shendra Sharma share his concerns so objective uh this week is to

Try to assess what the situation is in Nepal I mean what the situation seems to be we know people have not come back they’ve died abroad uh but also seems that many workers who have come back are sick with kidney disease and they’re healthy before they left U many of them

Face conditions very similar in terms of heavy work and high heat like what we see in Central America and our goal is to kind of characterize what’s going on in the clinical level but also in the population level in the communities but also really understand what the burden

Is on the health system because no country can afford a preponderance of new dialysis patients unbelievably expensive certainly not Nepal porm was once a migrant worker in the Gulf States He installed air conditioners in Dubai 5 years ago he suddenly returned to Nepal due to chronic kidney Insufficiency foreign speech ] for spech ] so Dubai this was during his regular screening they found he had a pretty thorough examination and they found his blood pressure was high and the and the physician who was screening him prescribed him some blood pressure medications and didn’t tell him much so

He went back to work and later in the day he got a phone call and kind of back and forth back and forth and he recall Physicians telling him over the phone that you have to come because your kidneys are failing when they told him that his kidneys were failing like he

Knew what it meant they also added that you need to go back to Nepal right that’s what right they’re like you’re no good to us anymore you’re going home this story of like someone not realizing it until they felt tired or like a random check or they had a

Collapse and they’re in stage five or at best four like this is the story of like every sugarcan worker unless they’re getting screened it’s just awful like this again and again what we see so it’s very similar it’s like disturbingly Similar exporting labor to warmer countries is a key pillar of Nepal’s economy more than a quarter of its gross domestic product can be traced to the money workers earn in places like the Gulf States and Malaysia migrant labor brings in money but it comes at a higher Price Dr Rishi cfle is an apologist during recent years the beds at his Hospital have been filling up with young men who returned from warmer countries with kidney Failure we can’t get more equipment nursing staff and technicians on such short notice for some patients there’s not even room to them the nepales government recently said it was prepared to take over the costs of dialysis for all patients without means but it’s uncertain whether the country can afford it hello

Hello when I talked with these people why you returned quickly you went you were insured yeah you were insured so you were healthy the documentation is there you became sick yeah the became sick means the insurance should take care of you but why the insurance is limited to

Gulf why he’s return without anything why these people do not pay this is this is what I don’t understand the Gulf States are very rich countries they’ve and then these people get sick and they send them back and it’s the poor country and the poor people that shoulder the

Burden of their development everybody is telling prevention is better than treatment yeah prevention is better than cure where is the prevention where is prevention this really is a pandemic this is a global disease and again it’s affecting the people on the Bottom Rung that do the most necessary jobs and they’ve always

Been viewed as disposable there’s a shortage of epidemiological data many of the ill remain under the healthcare system’s radar those who would like to receive treatment need to go far from their home villages to the capital and start a new life like these sick people who have rented

An apartment together near a dialysis clinic all of them used to work in the Gulf States now they’re a burden on the State basically the entire country seen temperatures over 90 and if you take it a step further over the coming days more than 60 million people across the country will experience temperatures over 100° heat advisories going up all over the place from Texas throughout the South and it’s also starting to push

Into the east coast and into the Northeast the number of heat waves in the US has tripled in the last 60 years heat stress caused more than 1,500 deaths in the US in 2022 and a growing Branch package delivery is seeing more and more cases the family of a Waco UPS worker

Who died on the job over the summer has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the company on August 12th Jose Cruz Rodriguez was found dead at the UPS facility on Franklin Avenue yesterday his mom and dad filed suit against ups and two supervisors they say their son died of heat

Stroke there’s no pain that I wish upon nobody you know my son was young he had a whole life of H I don’t think he he deserve this Jose Cruz Rodriguez died age 23 from hypothermia after he complained to feeling unwell on his delivery route the driver’s Union the teamsters say his

Sudden death is no isolated case at UPS Nationwide the company is among those with the greatest number of heat related work accidents for the safety over surveillance rowy this company and this is fact that just came out posted record second quarter profits 88.5% over what they made last year

During a pandemic all right and they’re projected off for your backs you brothers and sisters to have revenue of over a hundred billion do in 2022 that’s great news because it’s a sovereign company but here’s the bad news last week on Thursday and Friday four of our members on Long Island and

In downtown Manhattan had to go to emergency rooms because of the heat today people are going to say it’s a nice day yeah it’s a nice day but your package cars are still going to be way over 100° imagine if your DM had his desk put on the street in

150° Asphalt or during a blizzard and they told him hey work from there and we’re going to be watching you while you do it stay safe brothers and sisters Vinnie Peron is a Teamsters representative how’s it going the union is one of the most powerful groups supporting drivers in the US

Thanks for coming out it’s struggling to have the management of UPS introduce measures to improve the safety of its drivers like putting air conditioning in the trucks remember that these uh new trucks that are coming in they’re mounting them with dashboard cameras they’re installing other cameras with driverf facing sensors but they won’t

Give us the bare minimum they won’t at least put fans in the trucks we’re saying that we got people dying because of the Heat and then they have the money to put camera the typical driver will make 130 to 200 deliveries a day okay they are

Getting in and out of the truck there working 11 12 hours a day and I experienced this myself you you go to a location and you walk in covered in sweat exhausted looking like you’re going to faint and the first thing out of a customer’s mouth is don’t you guys

Have AC in the truck no oh my God have a cup of water sit down the heat is brutal in the summer temperatures in the back of the vehicle regularly reach higher than 50° C that’s where the drivers spend part of the day sorting their packages but UPS delivery Personnel

Aren’t just exposed to extreme heat they’re expected to work quickly too they drive with their doors open to save time at every stop every one of their movements is monitored by software on board the truck then it’s analyzed by managers for potential time losses it feels like you have a gun to

Your head all day long you’re constantly being um harassed about the gaps in between your time their telematic system their spark system it tells them how long it should take you to do a stop now a stop could be an envelope of documents or it could be 40 packages that weigh

5050 lb each to this Warehouse here but to the computer that’s all the same thing it’s a race with time that makes delivery Personnel blind to their body signals this UPS worker in Arizona was filmed by a customer security camera he has all the symptoms of heat Stroke even as he wobbles he doesn’t forget to record his stop before he goes back to his Vehicle I didn’t even know what was going on I just you know I just was sweating a lot think about it you’re out in your vehicle and all of a sudden things are foggy you’re seeing little little stars I’m thinking okay well by 11:45 I got to get that that building finished

And I got to get to the next building by so you know for me I’m on a time schedule I’m not thinking about oh oh what’s going on in there you know no I’m the last thought I L my was kid be failures yeah me too 6 years ago Jim Clank nearly

Died at the wheel of his delivery truck the former UPS driver thanks the presence of mind of his wife a nurse who urged him to go to the emergency room okay the final diagnosis was acute renal failure um and that goes on to explain about the tubular necrosis and

The dehydration was resolved this is all pertaining to Arenal Failure despite 15 years Driving Experience and the prevention advice of his employer Jim’s Body hid its limits that day tell you to hydrate hydrate hydrate hydrate and in your mind the whole time you know you’re thinking okay what didn’t I do right right it’s always me it’s always what

Didn’t I do right and you know bottom line is it comes down to the fact that that you’re not in in Humane situations you’re in very inhumane situations you know you no human goes through life 10 hours a day in 150° weather it just doesn’t happen Lester the company

Made almost $5 billion in profits last year but they say it hasn’t calculated the cost of air conditioning because they say it wouldn’t be effective since the trucks make frequent stops and the doors are often open now some experts say there could be other Solutions like allowing more time for brakes when

Temperatures rise to dangerous levels and as for Jim clink he told us he’s considering retiring early even though it’s going to mean a cut in his penchy we’ve uh we’ve lost our right wheel for the first time audio okay you can shut that off now poster child luckily Jim’s kidney failure

Didn’t become chronic the organs recovered even though they are still damaged an inability to cope with the heat finally drove Jim to give up his job shocked by the behavior of his company his wife Teresa started a petition to force UPS to install air conditioners in the trucks okay through this she discovered

How desperate UPS workers are all over the country um all right so okay my fiance is a driver and I have firsthand seen him after work completely exhausted on the brink of heat exhaustion now this is a driver we spend a lot more time inside the vehicle than we should

We don’t get to start earlier or have workload adjusted something has to give we have 1,312 656 uh petition Signers according to Independent research by NBC between 2015 and 2019 at least 107 UPS workers had to be hospitalized due to heat related work accidents And the authorities and the unions say the true figure could be much higher they have tried to hide injuries especially and accidents they try to keep you from reporting something they’ll say well you know what go home take a couple of days off not knowing

What it’s going to do to your body 10 years from now a current study warns that delivery staff face the risk of developing chronic kidney disease like the kind observed in Central America when we asked the company said the health of its workers was a top priority we believe that by training our

People to be prepared and by providing ample resources for support and hydration we can continue to keep them safe last summer we accelerated the installation of fans in every UPS small package delivery vehicle in the US and provided our employees with 260,000 new uniforms with wicking dryfit shirts and

Performance fabric shorts more than 164,000 cooling tunnels more than 31 million bottles of water plus ice and fruits with high water Content since 2011 OSHA the US work Safety Authority has fined UPS seven times for insufficient heat protection for its employees the fines were never in excess of $155,000 at a national level complaints against companies are rare because in the US there are no required Nationwide laws to force employers to prevent heat

Stress let’s face it there will always be the need for those kind of workers in the outdoors and in the warehouses so uh we should come to grips with it and finally have some standards to protect them a member of the US House of Representatives from California Judy Chu

Has fought for 15 years to include heat protection in federal labor law in 2006 she saw a state law passed requiring companies to offer water and breakes to laborers working in temperatures over 35° C California actually has had millions of penalties imposed on employers I still think that California can do a

Better job in terms of the inspe though nonetheless of course we don’t have enough penalties across the United States because the conditions haven’t even been implemented by OSHA so we have to have those rules there as a condition of work for both indoor and outdoor workers the representative has found an

Important Ally in the White House President Joe Biden and vice president Kamala Harris are demanding that OSHA develop regulations to prevent heat stress on the job Outdoor heat indoor heat presents a workplace safety issue and employers are responsible for protecting their workers in the workplace from the dangers of heat including in farm fields in delivery Vans everywhere that has workers it’s no easy feat while there are standards OSHA has failed to create official laws and guidelines for their

Implementation I definitely think that there will be uh industries that will be resistant because they would say that uh it will um make them lose money that their workers won’t be as productive but is it really as simple as protecting labor equals reduced profits a few companies have recognized

In the meantime that doing nothing can be the most costly strategy of all North India is struggling as the temperatures are soaring a heat wave is all set to unfortunately continue for the next 2 days and temperatures actually over the weekend touched 49° the Met department has issued one

Advisory after another to people not to venture Outdoors unless absolutely necessary in 2022 India had a historic heat wve that lasted for more than 3 months it seemed to confirm the predictions of climate researchers that our future will be full of earlier more frequent and more severe heat

Waves global warming could force India’s economic growth to make an emergency stop that’s because the heat has costs and economists are getting better and better at quantifying Them you can have efficiency on the Y AIS and temperature on the x-axis so through literature and through many studies we’ve seen that that the human body has a threshold at the 18° C wet bulb temperature so this corresponds to 29 30° C in the dry temperature you see

That the efficiency or the productivity of any human dramatically Falls and continues to fall the Garment sector is one of the largest employers uh in the formal space of women there are approximately 45 million workers in this space and a majority of them are Women these workers are set up in production lines so they are situated very close to each other and the work is fastpaced so when workers are so closely situated apart from the room temperature itself there’s other sources of body heat that’s coming out as the ambient of the room

Temperature is increasing the effect on the human body is very clear your mental abilities start slowing down physiologically your body is getting tired faster and in the factories there are very clear targets that are Set textile workers are in a bind the climate is forcing them to slow down while the system demands the work faster and faster maybe for 5 to 10 minutes maybe 20 minutes you can push and still meet your targets but at the end of the day you will definitely reach a situation

Where the fatigue will be too much for you to control it might start with one wrong Stitch here or there and then by the end of the day you’re just making mistakes all around apart from you not able to meet meeting your targets you can also lose your job

The Indian textile giant Shahi can precisely measure how temperature impacts its employees to the degree the company discovered this almost accidentally so we started making out which are the measures we can take for reduction in power consumption so there we started identifying High higher efficiency lightings in place of conventional compact forent

Lamps which use more electricity and also there is lot of heat the electricity gets converted into heat which is not required in the factories that have that ended up adopting LED lights we saw that the productivity or the efficiency of workers did fall past that 18° threshold but it didn’t fall as

Drastically as in those factories where traditional lighting still existed the conversion to LED lights reduced the temperature on the factory floor by 3 to 4° C with each degree of decrease the productivity of the workers grew by around 3% the company recognized how beneficial

It would be to find a way to cool the employees off today the factories are equipped with enormous fans and ventilation systems but the seamstresses are still stuck on the production line do you adapt your target production to the daily temperature so actually always know we we target the

Efficiency of our plant at the desired level standard levels only and we take precautionary measures as I said in case of making the designs if we are not getting that productivity or the efficiency then the factory coming up in that area will not be viable and those

People will get uh will lose this opportunity of Employment it’s not just the worker it’s the firm also that’s getting affected so overall you the more that you zoom out you can it’s a very real possibility where economically uh your sector even as a nation you’re poter off than before simple interaction between heat and the

Human body has a very massive effect on the national Economy when it’s hot people work less more slowly and less effectively this is causing more than $2 trillion dollar to be lost to the global economy Annually this figure is forecast to double by 2050 as a result of climate change in Europe in the South especially frequent heat waves are projected to cause high losses but the rise in temperature will hit the economies on the equator Hardest while some companies are already trying to adapt millions of workers just don’t have the means to do it in India 90% of them work in the informal economy and most are women these invisible laborers work without contracts or Social Security that’s really a tragedy because women actually who are working from from

The home plays a very important role when you talk about an economy so most of the multinational companies when they are manufacturing their product these products are actually outsourced to the women who are working in this slums so if you look at the houses that we find in slum areas those houses are

Constructed from Material like tin seeds or cement seeds or tarpine uh and all these materials are will trap heat the surface high temperature outside is 45° C the women who are working from their home will actually be filling like 47 or 4° c this summer has been warmer than usual

I’ve been living in a hbad for 30 years and it’s never been this hot D cabin is a seamstress in the slums of a hbad heat waves are common in the city but this year the extreme heat came even earlier than normal in March for almost 40 days in a row

Temperatures hit 40° C C is last week it was so hot that for three or 4 days I couldn’t work I turned down the jobs my customers had for me normally DP cin earns around 200 rupees a day that’s around € the heat reduces her earnings as if it

Were a tax each degree reducing them by a few rupees on an average we have observed the productivity loss anything between 30% to 50% depending on the kind of work that they are doing definitely the money that they are going to make during that month will reduce but on the other side

They are making more investment also in this summer for example they have to uh pay little bit extra on their electricity charges to keep their home cools so when we talk about the climate change I think we need to realize that most of the vulnerable population particularly Urban poor they are facing

The impact today and now it’s not something that is going to affect them in the [Applause] future with the support of the NGO mahila DP cin has founded an all female neighborhood Committee they’re not responsible for the problem affecting them but they have no other choice than to seek Solutions together do you know how hot it is today no you don’t some no some don’t it’s 46° yes that’s right 46° before I used to work six hours a day

Sometimes eight even back when I was employed at a company now I only work 2 hours but after an hour I’m already wiped out before I earned €3 a day now I just stay home in the summer and do nothing when you’re sewing you’ve got to

Sit for hours I can’t manage that when it’s hot I can barely breathe I get dizzy and my blood pressure drops what can we do about the heat everyone should plant a tree if everyone would plant a tree that would take a bit of the heat off

Us and the kids could play under them we should plant trees but the streets are too narrow to plant trees according to our calculations for the whole of India we’re talking about at the end of the century uh on the current tracks of climate change about 15% of

The work hours will be lost overall in the country so that’s uh again almost two months out of a year you know it’s estimated the effects of heat on productivity could cause India to lose around 4% of its gross domestic product by 2030 the workers in major cities are

Those who suffer most from the Heat uh so we are creating a three-dimensional map of Amad where buildings and trees and Open Spaces everything is getting created at the same time we will be superimposing a remote sensing data a surface temperature data to understand where the heat pockets are where the the cool

Pockets are and what is the density of buildings and what is the density of trees and so and so forth very preliminary study suggest that the surface temperature difference from one area to other area could be in the range of 8 to 16° as well the same city the

People who stays in a in a area which are having a more vegetation will not feel so much of Heat versus people who are living in a area which is very crowded and densely packed we feel Heat cooling cities is an economic challenge because 80% of global wealth is produced

In urban areas and half of the population lives and works there architect Rajan raell is working on a major task for the 21st century access to cooling is sort of necessity now it’s no more luxury so how do we provide a cooling to large amount of people is where the

Challenges active room air conditioners do bring two challenges one is the energy consumption and the way we produce energy right now does add a lot of emissions at the same time refrigerant we which used inside the the the equipment also has a global warming potential so on these two fronts

Probably it’s it’s going to be really really challenging how do we really cap this the demand for air conditioners could grow by a factor of 10 in the next 15 years today it’s available to a small percentage of the Indian population but adapting to climate change with air conditioning isn’t just

A mistake it’s a trap so to provide a cooling within the building room air conditioner needs to extract the heat which is getting produced used within the building now when it puts the heat Outdoors outdoor temperature locally in the micro environment also goes up the heat emissions from air conditioners can raise outdoor

Temperatures in a city district by 1 or 2° C so the comfort of individual workers is achieved at the cost of others for Rajan raal the solution would come in the form of strategic use of Technologies and what he calls personal thermal Comfort we don’t want to condition

Entire building but we just want to create a micro environment around people and to do that we use thermal Menin the personalized Comfort System has a two Advantage it does use less energy but at the same time it provides an opportunity for each individuals to set their own thermal environment and

The most moment you provide uh appropriate thermal environment for different occupants at different level their productivity definitely goes up because they are happy in their own thermal environment India needs to find affordable solutions to Shield itself from future heat waves like this reflective paint women

In the slums of a hum deot are buying at the mahila NGO it can reduce temperatures in the buildings by 4 to 5° C experts say we have to come up with new Concepts for Cities making them Greener building differently and of course improving interior ventilation [Laughter] if we don’t adapt there’s a danger that a thermal Gap could open up in cities highly qualified workers would then only be able to escape the heat While others would suffer in it in this new world of work Pains of glass and air conditioning will separate those who sweat from those who

Don’t in a warming world people see a lot of risk and that’s understandable and there is a lot of risk but there’s also an enormous amount of opportunity to change how we organize work to change how we value people we can actually save both industry and government a ton of money

By making sure people don’t get Sick the question for me is how do we think about reconceptualizing production how do we think of reconceptualizing work if we want to produce in the conditions of climate change the only way to imagine continuing to produce is to imagine drawing on the expertise of workers to restructure that

System of production whether it’s a UPS driver or a construction worker in C what will be the place of workers who are indispensable to our economy in the new climate age will they be valued less because heat makes them less productive and who will pay the price of protecting

Them what is clear is their situation depends more than ever on how well we take care of our Planet

Temperatures of more than 50 degrees Celsius. Normal, and sometimes fatal for construction site laborers in Qatar. It’s thought some 400 million workers around the world are suffering in the increasing heat. Climate change is exacerbating social inequality everywhere.

Whether it’s construction workers in the Middle East, parcel delivery drivers in the US or farm laborers in Central America – they’re all being pushed to their physical limits. An increasing number of epidemiologists, doctors and economists are warning of a risk that’s also heading Europe’s way: heat can kill. The film tells the story of the many migrant laborers who arrive in Qatar in good health, but who die on the job. The deaths are officially put down to natural causes. But they are linked to the inhumane temperatures that prevail in the region.

Heat can also be a stealthy killer. The documentary focuses on the first occupational illness directly attributable to heat: chronic renal failure discovered in sugar cane plantation workers Nicaragua and El Salvador. Kidney disease can also be observed in UPS parcel carriers in the US, who drive in non-air-conditioned vehicles and follow a tight work schedule.
Climate change is exacerbating social inequality worldwide and drawing up new boundaries between those who in a position to protect themselves from its consequences, and all those helplessly at the mercy of rising temperatures.

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