The climate emergency is with us, and the labour movement must fight for protection from the new conditions as well as an end to fossil fuels, argues Kevin Crane

On the day that the hottest June in history came to an end, the heatwave killed a man who was trying to work through it. Forty-seven-year-old Aït el Azam Brahim, a Moroccan-born construction worker in the Bologna region of Italy was busy at a school when he collapsed shortly after midday. To the horror of his colleagues, he died soon afterwards.

Heatstroke is a notorious stealth-attack condition, in which your body loses its capacity to regulate body temperature as a result of prolonged exposure to high heat. Prior to its onset, people often feel giddy or tired, but seldom have a sense of how close they are to a life-threatening situation. This is particularly the case if you aren’t used to the conditions or just aren’t expecting them. The problem we are all facing today is that past summers are not preparing us for the ones we’re having now.

The response to Brahim’s death in Italy has been one of major public shock. Italy’s General Labour Confederation, GGIL, instantly lobbied government for emergency workers’ protections. The regional government has responded by decreeing a new system of ‘red heat alerts’. These will prohibit most outdoor and agricultural work in the early afternoon, until September when midday heat should return to manageable levels.

Beyond Italy, the incident has rightly focused people’s minds about the reality of living ordinary life in a changed climate. Many countries, Britain included, lack proper rules and regulations about maximum working temperatures. Indeed, more legislation has been passed to protect animals from extreme heat than it has for people. Schools and other public buildings have almost all been constructed with only the most basic facilities for cooling. Public transport is also a major concern. Riding the London Underground in the summertime has been famously unpleasant for decades; we might now be facing a future where it is significantly unsafe in July and August.

Elites in our society are continuing to bury their heads in the sand about the reality of the climate crisis. Trends that have been in place for a long time, and that are pointing towards catastrophe, are still being treated as blips, as if a return to normal is right around the corner. We just have to get used to construction workers dropping dead, to wildfires (which already began in England this week) and to flash floods.  In the meantime, the upper class can focus on the things they actually care about: capitalist profit and the drive to war.

The onus is on working people (unjustly, as they did not cause the crisis), to bring the fight to the ruling classes over climate change. There was a time when this would have been a single-pronged battle, simply to cut carbon emissions and prevent the emergency. Now, unfortunately, the second prong of adaptation is necessary too. The labour movement needs proactively to organise safe working conditions for our class in the changing climate.