Government Advises Working From Home During Heatwave as Unions Demand Legal Right to Stop Working at 25°C
The next few days of forecast high temperatures “may be a moment to work from home” a senior Government minister said on Saturday as unions grabbed the opportunity to demand the right to stop working if temperatures hit, er, 25°C. The Telegraph has more.
Cabinet Office Minister Kit Malthouse has warned that road and rail faced “significant disruption” due to the heatwave as he urged people to avoid travelling on Monday and Tuesday.
Number 10 also warned schools against closing because of the risk that unsupervised children could come to harm in the scorching temperatures.
Senior ministers and officials met as part of the Government’s emergency Cobra committee ahead of a 48-hour period in which temperatures are expected to clear 104°F (40°C) in parts of England.
Mr. Malthouse said: “Obviously, the transport providers are messaging people that they should only travel if they really need to on Monday and Tuesday.
“Services are going to be significantly affected. The heat will affect rails, for example, so the trains have to run slower. There may be fewer services. People need to be on their guard for disruption. If they don’t have to travel, this may be a moment to work from home.”
Mr. Malthouse said steps have been taken to ensure hospitals and ambulances that may come under pressure were prepared.
Schools were also issued with guidance to enable them to remain open. One official said: “It is better for kids to be supervised in that sort of weather. There is a risk that if kids are off school they won’t be supervised and there is more risk they will come into contact with rivers and lakes and there are vulnerable kids who will be left completely alone.” [And for their education?]
Union bosses are calling for workers to have the day off if conditions exceed 25°C, and for employers to provide sun cream, hats with neck covers and more breaks to reduce the risk of heatstroke.
GMB Union, which represents over 50,000 workers, has demanded that a legal maximum working temperature be imposed in all working environments across the country, and suggested that if bosses fail to provide cool enough conditions, workers should walk out.
They have also called on employers to impose “workplace adjustments” such as providing hats, suncream, protective clothing, flexible dress codes, extra breaks, flexible working and travel arrangements, air conditioning and water access.
The heatwave comes amid a summer of strike action across the travel, health and legal sectors and the latest calls from unions have sparked condemnation from MPs who claim that the hot weather is “just another bandwagon to jump on” and have dismissed calls for “a blanket ban” and to just “send everybody home when it gets to a certain temperature”.
Currently, temperatures in indoor workplaces are covered by the Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992, which places a legal obligation on employers to provide a “reasonable” temperature in the workplace. This is often interpreted as being at least 16°C.
However, there is no legal maximum temperature. As a result, unions are warning that “workers need protection in soaring temperatures” and that a legal maximum temperature of 25°C should be imposed nationwide as the record-breaking heatwave is set to hit the U.K.
The TUC and Unite unions have previously called for a maximum indoor working temperature of 30°C to be introduced – with the maximum limit falling to 27°C if employees are carrying out strenuous work. However, the GMB limit of 25°C is the first time that unions have called for such a low limit.
So unaccustomed are Brits to hot summer days that they think it’s an emergency when a few come along.
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The virus is fear. Once infected even a hot day will cripple you. Where did that virus originate? The answer to that, I believe, goes back decades. It starts with a genuine, and perfectly reasonable, observation that males appear to have an unfair advantage over females. It ends with masculinity itself being ‘toxic’, something that needs to be weeded out and exterminated. So what we do to weed out this ill is we replace distancing of emotion (or the appearance of an emotional disconnect) with an obsession with displaying emotion; it’s now cool to be ‘in tune’ with your ‘feelings’. We replace masculinity with femininity and now the world’s a better place right? No. There is a need for masculinity, a need for not always displaying emotion. It provides a balance and stability that is lost when emotion becomes king. Men need to get back to being men again, the sooner the better.
Masculinity is itself already a contiminated term. This refers to the gender of nouns in language where nouns are gendered. Eg, in German, der Hund is a masculine noun and die Katze is a feminine one. The proper term for people is manliness and not masculinity. The latter has probably been substituted to get rid of the positive connotations of the former and possibly also, because the claim that people don’t have sexes but genders fits into the larger woke agenda.
25 degrees – Twenty-Five! That’s 77 degrees Fahrenheit! Someone has made a mistake, to put it mildly!
Blimey, I’m expecting to work at 35 degrees celsius (95 degrees) or more tomorrow, and not in some cushy office job either.
I did once hear that the body starts to function less effectively at 35 degrees celsius (though this can be mitigated by dousing in cool water etc. (I dare say jalapenos and chili sauce might help too)) but 25 degrees celsius? Shome mishtake surely?
It is the Unions, Hugh. I wouldn’t rule it out.
They obviously want a maxmimum temperature limit which can realistically be achieved. Ideally, this would be >= 25C, extreme heat, get paid leave because working is just too unhealthy, <20C, extreme cold, get paid leave because working is just too unhealthy. One should always keep in mind that the union strategy for coping with inflations is pay rises, ie, increase the money supply.
Stop working at 25C!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Ye gods what a bunch of wusses.
Don’t recall stopping working at all in 1976 – no a/c units then – we just went out and enjoyed the sunshine.
Also what about all the people who go on holiday hoping for high temperatures? The people in holiday hotspots are still working!!
War stops when it gets too hot….oh,er hang on, no they don’t. I was sent home from work as a trainee draughtsman for not wearing a tie to the office (no aircon, just open windows) – what a joke this country has become.
This is precisely why the government should have stood firm against setting the precedent of lockdowns. It has well and truly painted itself into a corner. Unions and some members of the public are now expecting the government to rescue them from any adversity, big or small. Everything is now an “emergency”: it’s not a couple of hot days in summer, it’s a “heat emergency”. There is no doubt that the government instructed/bullied/bribed the Met Office into calling it an “emergency”. The fact that these “threat levels” have only existed since last year speaks volumes.
Awaiting the comment in three days’ time of “actually, the heat emergency was not as bad as previously feared”, just as the government knew would be the case, just as happened with the predicted Armageddon from Covid, with death figures nowhere near as high as stooges such as Ferguson were telling us they would be.
Local peak Monday forecast just dropped from 32C to 30C on the BBC site.
ABSOLUTELY PATHETIC.
And here we go with the “climate crisis” Psy Ops and deliberately-generated hysteria – over a few hot, sunny days.
Anyone who lived through the long, hot summer of ’75 and the even longer-hotter one in ’76 knows the deliberate alarmism being generated is a load of bovine excrement.
All the propaganda demonstrates is that there are a great number of Public Sector jobs in the Nanny State Industry which need culling.
Government declares a national emergency in Britain cos the sun is shining in July! WTF!
https://youtu.be/rwoajhYER00
ME? I’m soakin’ up the vitamin D an’ feckin’ lovin’ it!
I guess all those poor people living in Singapore, including all the expats, will have to stop living and hide in caves forever since the average temperature is 30 degrees. What total nonsense and this is all being paid for with your hard earned tax dollars.
Having grown up in Australia and been a student in schools without air conditioning I find this hilarious. The Principal once promised that we could go home if the temperature went past 100F. It did, but we never got to go home.
Temperatures are not expected to clear 104F (40C). Some Met Office functionary said he believed there was a 50% chance of this happening. How he precisely arrived at this estimate is anybody guess. But the hypothetical 40C already went through the headlines in Germany by the time the British summer was still all warm downpours. This suggests centralized, international messaging. Further, it didn’t happen there. Hence, it’ll likely also not happen here.
I used to work for a sporting event in Morocco where competitors would run multi day marathons in the desert sometimes in 40 degree temps. I know it’s extreme. But it inspired me to go on challenging wilderness adventures. It’s amazing what a fit body and mind can achieve.
I have been arguing since the start that the Union leaderships have been bought. They are wholly on the side of the Davos Deviants. Suggesting that employees can down tools and walk out when temperatures hit 25° C is ridiculous but of course it helps to push the Reset agenda which among other things is all about pushing chaos.
“It’s not always about what they say it’s about.”
And that’s certainly the case here.
There could well be a lot of transport disruption as the batteries on electric vehicles catch fire in fairly high temperatures or suffer from massively reduced range as drivers have the air conditioning going full blast and the batteries output is reduced due to non optimal temperatures leading to many EV’s breaking down.
We’re being nudged. Climate change lockdowns will be next. People will be arrested if they leave their home on certain days, because they could faint and end up harming ‘our NHS’ or for driving cars when certain pollution levels are reached.
It’s obvious when you look at the catastrophist headlines in the mainstream press that they’re taking lessons learnt in the COVID-19 era and applying them to manmade climate change myths.
Next time there’s an Icelandic volcanic eruption and an ash cloud, expect a lockdown, compulsory masking to stop ash getting in your lungs and no commercial flights for months: just private jets for the likes of Harry and Meghan!! I wish I was joking! 😀