This Isn’t Heat. It’s Violence.

Essay

Author: Shikha Silliman Bhattacharjee

Date: June 2, 2026

In this essay, Shikha Silliman Bhattacharjee argues that extreme heat at work must be understood not only as a climate hazard, but as a form of workplace violence. Drawing evidence from various global supply chains and across countries, she shows how production targets, wage systems, and algorithmic pressures continue as if working conditions have not become hotter and more dangerous — forcing workers, rather than employers or contractors, to absorb the costs of rising heat.

Photograph by Ishan Tankha

It is 46°C on a solar farm in the United Arab Emirates. A Bangladeshi crane operator has not had a water break since morning tea. He tells researchers he is constantly dehydrated; “the heat” never really leaves his body. No one is hitting him. No one is threatening him with a weapon. And yet something is being done to his body – deliberately, predictably – by those who have organised his workday.

In Pakistan, inside a garment factory supplying fast fashion to European markets, a woman piece-rate worker remains at her sewing machine. She describes the factory floor as a “pressure cooker.” She does not get up to drink water; bathroom breaks are tightly controlled, and any pause risks lost wages or reprimand. So she stays seated, sweating through the shift – dehydration, exhaustion, and the cumulative strain on her body, accruing costs that far exceed her weekly wage.

In Riyadh, where the roads shimmer at 43°C, a delivery rider’s phone buzzes with another order. They keep coming, some from over 30 kilometres away. Refusing isn’t really an option: each rejection chips away at his ratings, and with them, his future access to work. Even when the platform flags “extreme weather,” his work must go on.

These are not simply the effects of a changing climate. They are industrially structured outcomes, produced at the intersection of rising temperatures and systems of work that demand uninterrupted productivity regardless of human limits.

To understand what is happening here, we need a different language, one that moves beyond framing these conditions as ‘risk’ or ‘hazard' and instead recognises them as a form of climate-driven workplace violence.

What is climate-driven workplace violence?

Climate-driven workplace violence refers to the systematic organisation of work in ways that expose workers to environmental conditions that predictably cause physical, psychological, sexual, and economic harm, without adequate protection, adaptation, or the meaningful ability to refuse.

This is not a metaphorical use of the term “violence.” It draws directly from the definition set out in the International Labour Organization’s Violence and Harassment Convention, 2019 (No. 190), which recognises workplace violence as a range of behaviours and practices that result in, or are likely to result in, harm. Crucially, this definition extends beyond individual acts of abuse to include harm embedded in working conditions and employment relationships.

Seen through this lens, requiring workers, whether through direct pressure or the structure of their jobs, to work in extreme heat without adequate rest, water, cooling, or medical support is not just a failure of workplace safety. It is a form of violence. 

Production targets, as we hear from workers across supply chains, do not change as the temperature rises. Wage systems, whether piece-rate, target-based, or algorithmically managed, penalise workers for slowing down. Breaks continue to be limited, and refusing to work can mean losing income or even the job itself. Across sectors, from agriculture and manufacturing to construction, renewables, and platform-based delivery, workers are pushed to adapt their bodies to conditions that go beyond safe human limits.

The result is a spectrum of violence. At one end are forms that are often normalised: dehydration, exhaustion, lost wages from slowed productivity. At the other are more visible and acute harms: heatstroke, injury, harassment, dismissal. What connects them is not their severity, but their shared origin in systems of work that prioritise output over the limits of the human body.

Who absorbs the heat?

If climate-driven workplace violence was evenly distributed, it would already demand urgent attention. It is not. And it is this uneven distribution that clarifies how the system operates.

To understand who bears the brunt of these conditions, I draw on the concept of ‘conjugated oppression’, the co-constitution of class relations with hierarchies of gender, caste, race, indigeneity, and migration status. These are not parallel axes of inequality. They are mutually reinforcing structures that shape who enters which segments of the labour market, under what conditions, and with what capacity to refuse harm.

This logic is written into the geography of heat exposure. Regions most affected by rising temperatures – South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and parts of Central America – are also key sites of labour-intensive production within global value chains. The concentration of climate risk in these regions is therefore not simply environmental. It is tied to the spatial organisation of the global economy, in which risk is externalised to sites of production, while value and control remain concentrated elsewhere.

Photograph by Ishan Tankha

Across sectors, a consistent pattern emerges. The global garment workforce, with over 75 million workers, is composed largely of women in the Global South. Construction sectors in the Gulf are overwhelmingly staffed by migrant workers from South and Southeast Asia, many employed under tied visa regimes that restrict mobility and access to remedy. In agriculture, the majority of workers remain outside formal systems of social protection. In platform-based delivery sectors across regions, the workforce is disproportionately made up of migrants and racialised minorities.

These distributions are not incidental. They are produced through labour regimes that rely on populations with limited bargaining power, rendering them more vulnerable to intensified forms of discipline under conditions of climate stress.

How does violence travel ? 

To understand how these pressures are transmitted, it is necessary to consider the role of monopsony capitalism, a system in which a small number of powerful buyers dominate the market and exert disproportionate control over suppliers and workers.

In the context of global supply chains, lead firms exercise disproportionate power over suppliers through pricing, timelines, and sourcing decisions. Suppliers, operating under these constraints, pass pressure downwards to workers in the form of intensified labour extraction, through speed-ups, wage suppression, restricted breaks, and disciplinary control.

Climate stress does not sit outside this structure. It is instead absorbed into it. The requirement to meet production targets under extreme heat, the penalisation of rest or reduced output, and the transfer of climate-related costs onto workers are not isolated outcomes. They reflect a system in which economic coercion is organised across multiple levels of the supply chain.

Monopsony, in this sense, is not an abstract description of market power. It is the mechanism through which climate risk is translated into labour discipline, and ultimately, into harm.

For example, in platform-based food delivery, a small number of dominant apps control access to work for thousands of riders. During extreme heat, delivery workers may continue accepting orders despite dangerous conditions because rejecting jobs can reduce ratings, incentives, or future access to work. The platform does not need to directly order workers to risk their health; the structure of economic dependence itself disciplines workers into continuing labour under unsafe temperatures. In this way, climate risk is converted into labour discipline through the concentrated power of the platform over access to income.

What needs to change?

When these conditions are framed as environmental hazards, the response is limited to mitigation: more awareness, behavioural adaptation measures, and incremental safety measures. But this framing leaves intact the organisation of work that produces harm in the first place. It treats the problem as one of adaptation, rather than of accountability.

Recognising these conditions as a form of workplace violence alters that terrain. It situates climate-driven harm within the domains of labour rights, regulation, and supply chain governance. It demands enforceable limits on work in extreme heat, protection against wage penalties for slowed productivity, and the recognition of workers’ right to refuse unsafe conditions without retaliation. It also calls for accountability beyond the worksite – across the full chain of actors whose decisions shape how work is organised under climate stress.

More broadly, this framing brings climate justice and labour rights into direct alignment. The impacts of climate change are not experienced uniformly. They are mediated through existing structures of inequality and economic power. Climate-driven workplace violence makes visible how these structures determine not only who is most exposed, but whose bodies are expected to absorb the costs of a warming world.

What is at stake, then, is not only how we respond to rising temperatures, but how we organise work itself. As heat intensifies, the question is no longer whether workers will be exposed, but under what conditions and at whose expense.