Elizabeth Humphrys has published a new book chapter in Jesse Adams Stein and Chantel Carr’s edited volume Working through Planetary Breakdown: Labour, Skill and the Changing Climate. Her chapter is on the experiences of blue-collar United Workers Union members — ‘essential workers’ — who laboured in high heat during the pandemic. The chapter could not have been written without the almost 800 workers who generously shared what it is like to work in extreme heat driven by climate change, reflecting on their experiences during the Covid-19 pandemic (2020-2022) and the Australian Black Summer Fires (2019-2020).
As Dr Adams Stein recently wrote, the edited collection “offers a genuinely interdisciplinary engagement with the future of paid and unpaid work in the context of decarbonisation, industrial transformation and an increasingly volatile climate. It offers fresh perspectives on climate, labour and skill, via rich empirical research and strong theoretical challenges to the status quo”. If you are unable to access the book through your university of public library do ask them to order it, or contact Dr Humphrys for a copy of the chapter.
Heat and work during the pandemic
