Climate change hurts workers. Climate action, including cutting emissions, just transitions and adapting to impacts already “baked in, is now core union business. Without urgent action, workers’ fundamental right to safe and healthy work will be increasingly undermined by rising temperatures and increasingly volatile weather.
The ACTU has published a position paper highlighting the growing impacts of climate change on Australian workers and the inadequacy of the current work health and safety framework to protect workers from those impacts and making 16 recommendations for regulatory reforms to strengthen the WHS rights-based framework by directly addressing worsening climate hazards.
The world is currently on track to experience nearly 3°C warming above pre-industrial levels by the end of this century. On that warming trajectory, the National Climate Risk Assessment (NCRA) concludes that by 2050, 1.5 million Australians living in coastal communities will be at high risk of annual flooding. By the 2060s, Australia will witness up to 45 days per year in which extreme heat makes manual labour too dangerous to perform outdoors and at least 2.7 million additional days of work are lost every year to climate disasters. By the end of this century, heat deaths will spike at 444% in Sydney, 423% in Darwin, 312% in Perth, and 259% in Melbourne and reduced labour and agricultural productivity will result in a cumulative wealth loss of $4.2 trillion.
Australia’s WHS framework is explicitly built on a rights-based foundation, enshrining every worker's right to "be shown how to work safely," and to work in environments "without risk to health and safety", with the Model WHS Act requiring duty holders to "eliminate or minimise risk" to "secure the health and safety of workers". Failure to adapt the WHS regime to address new and escalating climate impacts risks violating these foundational rights by failing to protect workers from foreseeable and preventable harm, effectively undermining the core principle that workers should receive "the highest level of protection against risks to their health and safety".
The Model WHS Act does not explicitly cover the hazards of climate change like extreme heat. Management of the problem is covered more generally by the primary duty to ensure a safe work environment. The core problem lies in the lack of specific regulations addressing climate-related WHS issues, which are necessary to ensure that employers seek to eliminate, or if not practicable, reduce the risks associated with climate impacts that compromise workers’ health and safety. These regulations should require employers to take all reasonably practicable steps, using the hierarchy of control, to meet their duty to provide a safe work environment.
The ACTU’s first 15 recommendations for reform are broken down into four key hazards, described below. The 16th recommendation calls for industry-specific compliance codes with sections addressing each of those four key hazards.
- Heat Stress - In Australia, temperature triggers and heat safety cut-off mechanisms are not common outside unionised workplaces where the relevant union has won the condition through enterprise bargaining. The current guidance on heat stress—Safe Work Australia's Guide on Managing the Risks of Working in Heat—is general, non-binding, and often confusing.
- Air Quality - Australia faces a critical regulatory gap in workplace indoor air quality protection, with existing frameworks providing insufficient protection for workers. Current WHS legislation relies primarily on Workplace Exposure Standards (WES) designed for specific industrial airborne contaminants like welding fumes and chemical vapours but lacks comprehensive indoor air quality performance standards that address broader environmental pollutants, such as particulate matter from bushfire smoke, build-up of carbon dioxide from poor ventilation, etc.
- Inclement Weather - The cascading effects of extreme-weather events made more frequent and intense by climate change are increasingly affecting every worker in Australia. Many extreme weather events have also led to major damage to hazardous installations, such as factories or extraction sites, triggering the release of hazardous substances, fires and explosions. Emergency and recovery workers are expected to work harder, for longer periods, in difficult and often hazardous circumstances. Extreme heat and extreme weather events have also shown a strong correlation to increases in violent behaviour, with community-facing workers often bearing the brunt.
- Vector-Borne Illnesses - Several studies have linked climate change impacts with an increased risk of vector-borne diseases in workers. Climate change is expected to alter the seasonality, distribution, and prevalence of existing vector-borne diseases, through higher temperatures, and shifts in humidity and rainfall patterns. These alterations can impact disease incidence through their effects on vector population sizes, survival rates, and reproduction. Outdoor workers are particularly susceptible to vector-borne diseases, as they have the highest exposure to vectors such as mosquitoes, ticks, and fleas. Occupations most affected include farm workers, foresters, landscapers, groundskeepers, gardeners, painters, roofers, pavers, construction workers, and firefighters. Emergency responders and healthcare workers who deal with infected subjects are also in danger of exposure.
It is important for workers and unions to understand the potential impact of climate change on our workplaces and join the fight for these issues to be addressed now. You can read about the ACTU’s recommendations for regulatory reform at Work Health and Safety in the Era of Climate Crisis | ACTU and you can read more here about how climate change affects workers - ACTU.