The Building and Wood Workers' International (BWI), affiliate union representatives from various regions and Greenpeace activists in Switzerland held a joint demonstration at the Broken Chair sculpture across the street from the Palace of Nations in Geneva and emphasised the urgent need for workers’ protection against extreme heat on 11 June 2026. They drew attention to the fact that governments and businesses failed in stopping climate change: some by active and conscious denialism, some with band-aid solutions, and at worst gave support to false solutions. The world already breached the 2015 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change objective of limiting the global average temperature increase to 1.5C above pre-industrialisation levels, the threshold recognised as a much safer limit to prevent the most severe and irreversible impacts of climate change in 2024.

As the climate breakdown deepens, the working and living conditions of workers, especially those in outdoor sectors such as building, construction, and forestry, worsen. As the world gets unbearably hotter and weather patterns increasingly destabilised, limits to human capacity to regulate body temperature become life-threatening. Furthermore, climate change deepens social inequality. While the elite capture vast global wealth and, in turn political processes, the workers, women, and poor people are condemned to suffer the consequences. Workers end up bearing the highest risks through impacts on health and wages, despite contributing very little to climate change. They spend hours enduring increasingly gruelling temperatures. It is now recognised by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) that there are significant economic consequences of heat stress on productivity and worker safety. Workplace heat stress causes approximately 19,000 deaths and 22.9 million occupational injuries globally each year. Exposure to excessive heat leads to fatal heatstroke and long-term illnesses like chronic kidney disease.

Critical measures must be taken now to limit global temperature. However, protective measures are not being adopted and implemented as quickly as the rising temperatures. Workers in the global majority countries have been dealing with extreme heat for far too long now. For example, the African continent is heating up faster than the rest of the world. That is why Stephen Okoro from the National Union of Civil Engineering, Construction, Furniture and Woodworkers in Nigeria called for global governments to pay attention to their plight without delay. Europe is catching up. Patrick Vanderberghe from the Belgian union ACV Building, Industry and Energy Union and BWO Deputy President highlighted that European workers are increasingly impacted by extreme heat too. Siau Fang Liaw of the Sabah Timber Industry Employees Union pressed that women in a male-dominated industry need protection from harsh working conditions and discrimination.

In this year’s International Labour Conference, Greenpeace, together with BWI demands the adoption and implementation of protection measures against heat in the workplace, especially for outdoor workers. According to Greenpeace Switzerland spokesperson Matthias Schlegel, “it is time to rewrite the rules so that no outdoor worker is ever forced to choose between a heatstroke and a paycheck”. Ambet Yuson, BWI General Secretary, summed up workers’ demand to stop work during extreme heat, be protected and be compensated. Indeed, any just adaptation to, or transition from, climate change needs the working class movement, the climate movement, and other social movements to work together and strengthen one another.