As the planet heats up, labour conditions are rapidly shifting. Climate change is supercharging exploitation and normalising unsafe work as corporations continue to prioritise profits over workers’ rights and wellbeing.
This new era needs more than just new kinds of labour protections. Entire sectors of the economy need to be restructured before they become even more lethal. Treating workers as expendable assets is as grotesque as it is economic folly. As one farmworker organiser told me, if companies continue on this path they “will go belly up”.
This is not hyperbole. The signs are clear in agriculture, construction, food service, even bag handling at airports. But policymakers and managers – not to speak of boards and shareholders – show little interest in the warning. They have long presided over environmental harms and forms of production that are incompatible with decent labour conditions and human flourishing. Now, extreme heat and other consequences of climate change are transforming workplaces into sites that meet the legal, US definition of trafficking (labour under force, fraud or coercion).
