Extreme heat kills quietly, and this year it arrived early. Hong Kong had barely entered summer before the Labour Department was issuing heat-stress warning after warning, with outdoor workers bearing the brunt. Elsewhere, governments have spent the past few years moving to protect workers from the dangers of labouring in extreme temperatures. Hong Kong, by contrast, continues to rely on non-binding guidance and employers’ good nature, an approach that looks increasingly threadbare.
The International Labour Organization (ILO) has just adopted its first-ever conclusions on occupational safety regarding extreme weather and climate change, following a tripartite meeting of government, employer, and trade union representatives. It is a clear signal that the rest of the world now treats extreme heat as a core health and safety issue. Hong Kong can no longer credibly claim to be the exception.
The ILO’s message: workers need a seat at the table
Held over five days in mid-April, the tripartite meeting brought delegates together to hammer out clear guidance on managing weather-related hazards across industries. At national level, the resulting document calls for evidence-based risk thresholds, robust occupational health surveillance, and joined-up coordination between labour, public health, environmental, infrastructure, and disaster-management bodies. At workplace level, it goes further: insisting that workers must be consulted and genuinely involved in decisions on any safety matter linked to extreme weather. The conclusions go before the ILO’s Governing Body for formal approval in November.
The scale of the problem is sobering. The ILO estimates that 2.4 billion workers worldwide, more than seven in ten of the global workforce are exposed to excessive heat at least once a year, with roughly 19,000 heat-related workplace deaths recorded annually. In adopting these conclusions, the organisation noted that the world of work is taking extreme weather seriously; the immediate task now is turning that guidance into action on the ground.
Spain and France have already changed the law
Governments elsewhere have moved decisively from voluntary advice to binding regulation, with Spain and France leading the way. Spain amended its occupational safety rules in 2023 to require employers to adapt outdoor working arrangements whenever an official extreme-heat warning is issued, with high-risk operations ordered to down tools altogether.
France went further still with legislation introduced in 2025. Employers there are legally obliged to conduct risk assessments during heat alerts, assess heat-stress hazards, and provide drinking water, cooling equipment, and adjusted shift patterns. Companies must also have emergency procedures ready to deploy so that if a worker shows signs of heat exhaustion, immediate care kicks in. Where a firm falls short, labour inspectors can step in and order work to cease. Workers themselves can also exercise their statutory right to withdraw from unsafe working conditions.
Hong Kong’s guidance is easy for employers to ignore
Hong Kong’s approach looks distinctly flimsy by comparison. The government introduced its heat-stress warning system in 2023 alongside guidelines recommending rest breaks scaled to warning levels and job intensity. But with no legal teeth behind them, the guidelines are easily sidestepped. Employers are routinely caught failing to offer recommended breaks, and at least one worker has already died of heatstroke while only a lower-tier “amber” warning was in force.
The warning system is now in its fourth year, and criticism remains sharp. A year after launch, officials tweaked the mechanism for lifting warnings so they would stop flickering on and off in rapid succession. This year brought another minor adjustment: nine additional Observatory monitoring stations feeding into the system. On paper, these look like improvements. In reality, they are technical tweaks dressed up as progress — tinkering around the edges while dodging the necessary step of statutory legislation.
Between 2024 and 2025, the Labour Department logged 60 workplace injuries linked to heat stress. Over those two summers, inspectors carried out 46,674 site visits to high-risk locations and issued 1,739 warning letters. Not a single visit resulted in an improvement notice or a work-suspension order.
This year, before summer had properly got underway, the department had already issued heat warnings on four separate days by late May — a worrying harbinger of what outdoor workers face in the coming months. Global warming is reshaping the world of work. Extreme heat, once brushed off as a mere feature of the weather, is internationally recognised as a grave threat to occupational health and safety. The longer Hong Kong stands still, the further it will drift from global standards.