A recent neighbourhood interaction led me back to a September 18 submission on this page related to the impact of climate change on the world of work, including some observations being made right here in the Caribbean.
I had shared a story involving a neighbourhood postal worker who was witnessed taking a rare breather in considerably intolerable heat one morning.
I was in the company of friend and colleague, climate change expert Steve Maximay, who suggested that whatever the precise meteorological outcomes – like the heat that day and torrential rainfall last Monday – countries all over the world must eventually address the issue of climate change and labour conditions.
Of course, this was no novel observation. It is a story some have been tracking for decades now – negotiating uninformed scepticism, outright denial, and slow recognition of key areas of vulnerability in our neck of the woods.
The International Labour Organization (ILO), for example, has been paying close attention to this question from the standpoint of the rights and entitlements of workers within the context of dramatically changing workplace environments.
In fact, less than a week before Steve’s astute observation along the hilly streets of St Joseph, the UN agency had published its World Social Protection Report 2024–26. It is the kind of report that lands in your inbox and, under the best of circumstances, you put it aside for another day. It appears to me that the bureaucrats in our government sector and activists within our labour movement have been similarly inclined.
To be fair though, the authors of the 2025 Budget statement offered several scenarios regarding climate change and energy policy, the challenges to food production and public infrastructure, and threats to biological diversity. Some of this was particularly insightful and thought-provoking though not necessarily attracting the kind of public attention the state experts in the field had intended.
This country also manages a robust social safety net unlike anything our Caribbean community or even some big neighbours extend. So, it is not that we are averse to extending “social protections” in the form of direct and indirect financial support, but that changes in the world of work may lead to a serious review.
What appears to be urgent and passing relatively unnoticed by most major stakeholders is the contention that the unfolding impacts of climate change can and will irreversibly change the nature of work in many sectors. Measures reflected in work contracts, occupational safety and health standards (OSH), and labour legislation are required to mitigate the outcomes.
Business and employers’ organisations and our labour unions need to pay greater attention.
The thing with the ILO report is its preoccupation with a notion of “universal social protection” being a key part of climate action. Now, the international public servants have a way with fancy terminologies to describe everyday phenomena. But what is really meant by this is the prioritising of specific social services to cushion the effects of identifiable challenges to workers across the class divides.
This approach has the distinct flavour of the international dialogue regarding “a just transition” to low-carbon economies. For T&T and some of our neighbours, including Guyana and Suriname, it has immediate implications for our working populations both inside and outside of our critical energy sectors.
Yes, what happens to the Petrotrin refinery is important, but within the accompanying dialogue needs to be found greater advocacy on “social protections” for workers in the face of an emerging national and planetary crisis.
This goes beyond wages and salaries, as important as they are, and gets to the bottom of a phenomenon currently being witnessed even in bigger wealthier environments.
The recalibration of economies to reflect both the impacts of global climate change and the actions taken to address them are now high on the agendas of numerous nations – even in the face of the urgency of growing military and other conflict which, in some instances, is not unrelated to diminishing natural resources.
Countries such as ours that are small, vulnerable to global economic shocks, and with limited options for adapting to different developmental paradigms should be urgently engaging this challenge. That our own T&T economy appears to be contracting and will continue to contract requires much more than political manoeuvring to maintain public goodwill or to combat contesting claims.
This calls for a unified national approach that’s deliberately blind to real (or rather illusory) differences in developmental philosophy. Our social safety net, which is becoming increasingly strained and costly, will need to evolve in both scale and scope.
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