The climate emergency demands that we recognise workers’ rights

This article will follow the path a climate-dependent worker might take from a smallholding or plantation, where work has become increasingly difficult, to a factory, fishery or farm where they face ongoing exploitation.

Climate-dependent work

Around the world, millions of people rely on the land and other climate-dependent resources for their livelihoods. For smallholder farmers, agricultural workers and many others, the ecological crisis, therefore, threatens their way of life and leaves them vulnerable to exploitation from global markets and employers.

Agricultural workers and poor conditions

Those employed on larger plantations or farms as labourers also face worsening conditions. For centuries, such workers have faced serious violations – from poor wages and precarious employment to working conditions that have permanant health costs.

As harvests increasingly fail, seasonal and other workers could be left without employment, because they have no permanent contracts or salary.

For those still in work, conditions are likely to become harsher too. Plantation workers - from tea pickers in Bangladesh to tomato pickers in the USA - are often paid by weight rather than for the hours worked. This kind of precarious employment means that scarce harvests will translate to a fall in income.

Yet, many of these workers already receive far less than they need to meet their basic living needs. As days get hotter, productivity also goes down and wages fall further.

Workers are often expected to continue in these dangerously hot conditions or in the face of much more extreme weather patterns. The number of deaths amongst these workers each year is expected to rise.

Between 1992 and 2016, more than 783 workers in the US died and more than 69,000 suffered serious injuries due to heat exposure, according to the Bureau of Labour Statistics. The figure is expected to rise. Those that lack labour protections or risk being laid-off for speaking out, such as migrant workers, will be most at risk.

Forced into exploitative employment

Many are therefore being forced out of their traditional ways of working and into other industries, where employers and multinationals exploit the influx of new labour.

Sweatshop labour and climate migration

Climate breakdown is pushing people to cities and urban centres. Soon it will be the biggest global driver of forced migration, according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. As more workers arrive in need of work, employers can often offer increasingly low wages and poor conditions.

Dr Ashok Kumar, whose work specialises in global production networks and industrial relations, explains:

“If you are a migrant you can be exploited more easily, as you have either no workplace rights, or are terrified to assert them.”

Faced with so many workers desperately in need of an income, employers can erode standard conditions. At the same time, labourers become less able to organise and collectively bargain, due to the fear that they will simply be replaced if they speak out.

Migrants “confront a dire lack of workplace protection”, according to the International Labour Rights Forum.

Many industries have exploited these facts. Sweatshop factories depend on just such histories of urban migration and are notorious for their unsafe conditions and exploitative wages and hours.

Again, it is often women, with fewer options for employment, who pay the price. 80% of sweatshop workers are female, and many are undocumented migrants leaving them even further unable to respond.

Climate breakdown is already contributing to this situation. It is causing many to leave their villages in countries like Bangladesh and find employment in urban garment factories instead.

Each year, Dhaka, the capital, grows by more than 400,000 migrants from rural areas. Many of these migrants, particularly the women, will join the garment industry, which already employs 4 million of the city’s workers. It has long been known for its shocking labour conditions, epitomized by the Rana Plaza disaster in 2010.

In 2010, Mukhles Rahman, who was working as a security guard at a garment factory, told the New York Times:

“We are trying to find another place to go, because all the land back home is dissolving.”

Child labour, slavery and brick kilns

Elsewhere, climate change is forcing children into work at a young age.

In Nepal, changing rainfall patterns are threatening those that rely on agriculture, pushing them to migrate seasonally for work instead. Entire families move to work in brick kilns for several months, under enormous pressure to earn as much as possible before monsoon starts.

The kilns rely on a form of seasonal debt bondage, whereby the families are offered an advance at high interest rates in exchange for work in the kilns. Sometimes, the labour of children is pledged by parents in an attempt to repay the loan.

Sadly, such links between bonded labour and climate change are seen all over the world.

Those migrating from Cambodia and Myanmar due to the loss of farming opportunities face forced labour in the Thai fishing industry. Out of desperation to cross the border, migrants often use illegal channels and accrue large debts. In return for paying these off, they are offered work in the fishing industry and once there are subjected to violence and abuse, facing threats of torture or death if they leave the boats.

The fish caught is then used as fish food for prawn farms – the products from which have been sold in our supermarkets.

"I thought I was going to die," Vuthy, a former monk from Cambodia told The Guardian in 2015. He was sold from captain to captain.

"They kept me chained up, they didn't care about me or give me any food … They sold us like animals, but we are not animals – we are human beings."

The story is the same for others that rely on the land and its resources. In many cases, these communities either face increasingly harsh working conditions or the complete loss of their livelihoods and way of life.

Just Transition

It is not just farmers that need to be empowered to respond to a changing climate. Trade unions and civil society point out that many labour intensive industries will have to change in coming years, both in the UK and abroad.

“The voices of workers who are at the forefront of dealing with the challenge of climate change must be at the centre of achieving a successful transition to the economy we will need.”

Putting workers at the centre of the process recognises that they are in a powerful position, if properly supported, to demand and direct change within their industries. It will also ensure that they don’t bear the cost of the necessary shift.

This concept is often referred to as a ‘Just Transition’. Championed by labour unions and environmental justice groups, rooted in low-income communities of colour, it recognises the importance of workers alongside those of frontline and fence-line communities.

Sharing the transition cost

It’s these workers that have often been sidelined in other transitionary periods.



Trade unions and civil society must now work to address the risk to workers as we move to achieve global net zero targets. Their aim should be to replace, rather than replicate systems of power and injustice that for centuries have exploited workers and placed much of the cost of transition on women and communities of colour.

As the Climate Justice Alliance states: “Transition is inevitable. Justice is not.” For these reasons, the climate emergency demands that we recognise workers’ rights.