Hunton Employment & Labor Perspectives

Occupational heat is no longer just a workplace safety issue.  It is now a theory of boardroom liability.  For years, occupational health professionals have documented the physical toll of extreme heat.  Major brands have published voluntary standards for over a decade to mitigate heat hazards at work.  These measures aim to reduce heat exposure and promote worker hydration and rest breaks.  However, union strategic campaigns often view occupational heat as a chance to gain leverage by asserting that corporate safety policies are inadequate in substance or implementation.

One of the first deployments of the updated heat‑as‑leverage strategy was the Building and Wood Workers’ International Union’s (BWI) campaign targeting the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar.  BWI built this campaign around Gulf heat, host‑state resistance, and worker mortality.  Using media and international pressure, BWI targeted FIFA with claims that FIFA had an independent responsibility to oversee human rights within its operational footprint.  BWI’s objective extended beyond heat protection.  It was a now‑familiar, top-down strategic campaign strategy, designed to force Qatar and FIFA to install BWI as the representative for workers.   

Around this time, the International Labour Organization elevated ILO Convention 155 to a core labor principle, recognizing the right to safe and healthy working environments.  That move bolstered BWI’s campaign and increased the prominence of health and safety as pressure points in strategic campaigns.  Today, health and safety are increasingly becoming a central point of leverage, with organizing as the objective.  A 2024 UNI document, for example, focuses on “extreme heat” as a mechanism to “drop opposition to unionization.”  Such campaigns focus as much, if not more, on organizing and bargaining as on health and safety.

The new health-and-safety (H&S) campaigns forego general H&S issues to focus on limited issues and areas—like heat—that create the greatest opportunity for union leverage and best support allegations of corporate code failures, as opposed to process errors.  In turn, this new, limited campaign approach supports claims of significant business risk.  This approach is illustrated by a report on heat stress recently issued by Cornell University’s Global Labor Institute, which measures corporate commitments against localized climate data and factory‑floor temperatures.  At the same time, expanding audit and due diligence regimes generate self-reporting that campaigners can recast as evidence of corporate failure.  Corporations are thus increasingly boxed in: the more they disclose, assess, and commit, the more material campaigners have to argue that the company knew the risk and failed to manage it.

 The campaign objective is to trap organizations between Scylla and Charybdis.  Dispensing with codes and supply chain oversight is not an option.  An organization that does nothing after alleged problems is publicized risks litigation and investor pressure.  Yet, continued reporting, and even remediation, becomes grist for the campaign mill.  The campaigners offer a purported solution – permanent engagement with, and oversight by, labor unions through global union framework agreements or similar documents, such as the International Accord.  Of course, these documents include principles of freedom of association, which demand that signatories facilitate organizing and bargaining through their operations and supply chain. 

Conscientious employers already place a high value on maintaining a safe and healthful workplace.  This new approach requires them to also factor potential union vulnerability into their safety programs, and to develop approaches which mitigate H&S issues while effectively managing campaign strategies and tactics.