Despite the incredible amount of hot air generated around it, this year’s opening speech by the president of the Industrial Court, Her Honour Mrs Deborah Thomas-Felix, helped bring the discussion about climate change to the fore. She should be congratulated for that.
However, the comments that followed it were a lot less helpful.
First, let’s put things in perspective: humans have been and continue to be active in parts of the world that make the current heatwave in T&T pale in comparison to what they must go through.
For instance, the Arabian Peninsula, a region highly dependent on oil and gas exploration like ours, regularly sees temperatures over 40 degrees Celsius every summer, with some parts, like Kuwait City, often seeing their thermometers going beyond the 50 degree mark.
It is not easy but, just like with extreme cold temperatures, as human beings, we find ways to adapt and cope.
This doesn’t mean that nothing should be done, or that we should ignore the impact of higher temperatures than usual on how we work and how we treat the workforce, especially those more likely to be exposed to the high heat.
What this means, though, is that knee-jerk reactions are not the best way forward and that we shouldn’t mix up different issues and challenges or the end result is guaranteed to fall way below the intended outcomes.
Take work from home, for instance.
It was mentioned as one way to help tackle the negative impact of hot working conditions.
First, not everyone can work from home, especially those perhaps more likely to be taking the brunt of the hot weather, such as those who need to work outdoors or those with, quite literally, ‘hands-on jobs’. Or, to put it in another way, those more likely to be able to work from home are those also more likely to be already working in air-conditioned offices.
In fact, and as much as working from home has its benefits, dealing with issues such as hot weather may not be one of them, especially as they also carry wider implications to an employer’s health and safety responsibilities that may well be tested in the near future at the Industrial Court.
The reason is simple: by and large, there is an expectation that health and safety policies that apply to an employee in the workplace should also apply to when they are performing their duties from home.
But, at the same time, there are limitations to what the employer can do or mandate an employee to do when working from home.
For instance, if air conditioning is provided at the place of work, do employees working from home must also ensure they have the same? And, if not, who is responsible for that?
The impact of a warmer planet on labour matters shouldn’t be trivialised or played down, but the solutions can’t come through simplistic suggestions, from home working to prescriptive ways to provide water to the workforce, given how complex and much bigger the matter is.
Above all, and Mrs Thomas-Felix rightly alluded to that in her speech, what we need are cooler heads and a good dose of honesty, combined with goodwill from all parties, so that solutions can be found–from very specific matters related to collective agreement negotiations or staff welfare to bigger issues such as global warming’s impact on labour, the future of work and the upskilling of our workforce.
Her point also brings to the fore the fact that, down to our labour movement’s boycott, the tripartite body created to bring together the Government, union representatives and business leaders to discuss labour matters remains mothballed just as we need it most.
And, as we stall to quarrel, the world moves on.
Last week in New York, the presidents of the US and Brazil got together to create a partnership to improve labour relations by strengthening workers’ rights whilst also promoting job creation.
The initiative includes plans to increase actions to end child labour and tackle workplace discrimination (especially in relation to women and those from the LGBTQ+ community).
According to briefings by the White House and the Brazilian government, it also focuses on the job creation side as we go through the clean-energy transition and ‘to engage private-sector partners in innovative approaches to create decent jobs in key production chains’.
To be fair, none of this is controversial, presidents Biden and Lula da Silva have a long track record of support to the labour movement and what the partnership will mean in practice is yet to be explained.
What is important, though, is that they seem to be committed to a framework that focuses on workers’ rights in partnership with employers, and one that reflects the changing nature of the global economy, especially when it comes to the clean energy transition process and the digital economy.
Some will say that it is okay for countries like the US to push for these themes when they remain the world’s largest economy, their workforce is broadly highly skilled and the Government is pouring trillions of dollars into green or new technologies.
That’s true–but none of this can be said about Brazil’s economy, where workers’ skills remain a huge problem in a country still grappling with illiteracy and a poor education system, a high degree of poverty and little room for government investment due to its macroeconomic challenges.
But, despite coming from very different realities, what the leaders of the two countries seem to be signalling is that, yes, there might be more immediate concerns that need dealing with but that we must not allow them to distract us from the bigger, strategic picture.
To be blunt, we won’t become the thriving and just society we all desire in this still young republic if we restrict ourselves to discussing work from home or water in the workplace to tackle a heat wave at the expense of the considerably bigger labour challenges we face.
