It is reported that Angela Rayner has called for people to have the right to stop working during heatwaves. It was, to be fair, during her time in opposition, and her old tweet (from 2022) was, and is, in the public domain. So there’s no secret socialist plot.
On a newspaper story headlined “Unions call for maximum UK workplace temperature as heatwave descends”, she commented: “We need urgent guidance for safe indoor working temperatures and the government must ensure employers allow staff to work flexibly in this heat. Where is their plan to keep people safe?”
Obviously there’s been a (delayed) backlash to this “anti-growth” measure, and it is true that it would add another layer of regulation. However, I have some sympathy for Rayner’s view – for I have personal experience of it being too hot in the kitchen, so to speak.
Many years ago, I worked at a crisp factory. I won’t bore you with the details of my employment, but it should not surprise you that a crisp factory – while no steel furnace – is a very hot place to labour.
There were no windows, for a start, because the sun’s rays would damage the precious product at every stage of its processing, from raw potato to finished Cellophane bag (partly clear in those days).
The cookers were basically chip pans the size of a bungalow, and the rumbling conveyor-belts and clattering packing machines pumped out more racket and heat.
We had big posters near where we clocked in and out, detailing the main provisions of the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974, and – my memory is playing me up, I now realise – I thought there was a maximum temperature defined by law. But we’ve actually never had such a thing – only a minimum (13C for manual work, 16C otherwise).
Anyway, during a hot summer, the place was almost unbearable. But instead of a legal intervention, the company management and the Transport and General Workers’ Union had an arrangement whereby we’d get free soft drinks – Fanta, Panda Pops, Hoyes lemonade – and there would be a more relaxed attitude to taking “comfort breaks”.
Some of us felt that the union had been too accommodating, and thought we should have been paid extra for conditions that, foolishly, we compared to working on the Burma Railway.
The point is that, even though there wasn’t some kind of temperature trigger that meant everything had to stop, when things obviously started to get silly, ways were found to get round the problem. Production was hardly affected, though I do wonder whether having some of us succumb to heatstroke was an acceptable price to pay to help stave off economic recession.
Some places, as mentioned, are just going to be hot whatever the weather outside, so an arbitrary rule about stopping work at a given temperature wouldn’t be practical. But a stronger obligation on employers to ameliorate things is perfectly sensible.
These days, we work in offices where air-conditioning is virtually universal, and at home, where we can go around in a state of undress (though I am fully clothed as I write this, out of a misplaced sense of decency). The heat doesn’t get to us so easily.
However, climate change does present new challenges and requires some new thinking, drawing on the experiences of countries that have long since had to adapt to the summer torpor.
Maybe it’s time for a siesta for all the hard workers, as they churn out crisps and other items?
