NAUSEA, fainting, sometimes even death – the heat wave lasting in Europe has shed light on the dangers of extreme temperatures for some occupations and prompted unions to demand better worker protection.

Construction workers in work clothes labor on hot asphalt. Seasonal agricultural workers sweat profusely under plastic greenhouses. Some are forced to work in warehouses without air conditioning devices…

In addition to being hard to bear for all residents, the heat wave has become unbearable for certain sectors, which in recent days have been marked by several tragedies in southern Europe.

A series of deaths

In Spain, a worker in his fifties died after suffering “heatstroke” on Friday while working in a warehouse in the suburbs of Madrid. According to emergency services, his body temperature was 42.9 when they came to help him, he was unconscious and had convulsions.

A sixty-year-old man, who had been hired for a month by the company responsible for road maintenance, also died last weekend in Madrid while working, while another 58-year-old worker doing the same job was hospitalized on Tuesday after feeling unwell.

In Italy, at the beginning of July, two agricultural workers aged 20 and 57 died while working in temperatures higher than 40 degrees, local media reported.

Those two cases sparked a debate in Italy about working in extreme heat, a year after the death of a 27-year-old seasonal worker from Mali, which led several regions to ban work during the hottest part of the day.

Unions believe that more than ever it is necessary to take into account the temperatures at which workers operate in order to avoid tragedies, especially in light of the fact that meteorologists predict that heat waves could double in Europe by 2050.

The two deaths in Italy, as well as those in Madrid, “should never have happened”, said Spain’s two main unions UGT and CCOO, calling for workers’ exposure to high temperatures to be reduced.

“Europe needs prescribed maximum working temperatures”, the European Trade Union Confederation said on Twitter, calling for work to stop when it is too hot.

This approach is also defended by the European Trade Union Institute, a research center in Brussels, which called in a report for consideration of declaring “thermal stress related to meteorological conditions” an “occupational risk”.

Source: index.hr