While the impacts of climate change have long been felt by frontline communities battling unprecedented drought, our major cities are no longer insulated from the effects.

You can see it, you can smell it, and you can feel it in your lungs — and emergency services have warned that the worst of this fire season is still ahead of us.

Outdoor workers, especially those engaged in heavy labour, are particularly vulnerable to the health risks from smoke and particulate levels in the air.

These workers are on the frontline of the impacts of the climate crisis, which also include growing risks from heat stress.

Climatic conditions lead to walk offs

Earlier this month, about 100 Maritime Union of Australia members — working at three main terminals at Port Botany in Sydney's south-east — walked off the job due to unsafe conditions resulting from bushfire smoke.

The Australian Workers Union also advised that work had stopped on some road projects because of the bushfire smoke hazard, and the Electrical Trades Union and others urged members to immediately stop work if they felt ill or badly affected by climatic conditions.

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Construction workers across Sydney and Canberra have downed tools on the basis of workplace health and safety, and union firefighters travelled to Canberra to repeat their calls for greater resourcing and the phasing out of fossil fuels.

But poor air quality from smoke, as well as increasing climate heat, is now affecting broad groups of workers across multiple industries — including those indoors without adequate air conditioning and ventilation.

The situation is so bad in some parts of Sydney, including at the University of New South Wales, that smoke and fire alarms are going off inside buildings.

Air-conditioned homes shouldn't be our fortress

For many of us, the prospect of working into our 70s, under increasingly hot and humid working conditions, is daunting.

This is especially so for those with health conditions that make them susceptible to high heat and bushfire smoke.

A furtive retreat into the personal safety of air-conditioned homes — only possible for some, and only partially effective as a barrier against fine particles either way — feels not only alienating but woefully inadequate.

Unions are taking important first steps to protect their members from the risks associated with climate change, but this takes place in the context of decades of attacks on the rights of workers and their representative organisations — alongside the undermining of public institutions and funding cuts to key services.

Political-economic restructuring since the 1980s has shifted risk related to working conditions onto individual workers and families, and away from employers and the government, with casual, labour hire and precarious workers most vulnerable.

Fewer people than ever have access to annual and sick leave, and the unemployment rate is over 5 per cent — a figure which hides those who have given up looking (because there are no suitable jobs) and those that are underemployed.

Ideas of collectivism have also been undermined.

Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume. Watch Duration: 35 seconds 35 s Sydney's air quality plummets from surrounding bushfires.

Collective action the key

There is hope, however.

Internationally, we see citizens and workers coming together to fight for a better world, led in particular by the vibrant student climate strikes.

A mass movement capable of building effective collective action and a democratic response to climate change is our best hope of addressing both a warming world and access to decent, stable work.

We see citizens and workers coming together to fight for a better world. ( ABC News: Brendan Esposito )

And unions need to play a central role.

Some are, rightfully, worried about the financial and job security of their members as a result of suggested industry restructuring in response to climate change — especially for those working in the coal and energy sectors.

Tensions on climate policy are most difficult in unions like the CFMMEU, whose various divisions have different positions on the solutions to global warming and what might be necessary for a just transition to a renewable energy based economy.

Despite these fears and tensions, Australia has a radical history of union action on environmental issues.

In the 1970s, the Builders Labourers Federation (BLF) Green Bans were implemented in conjunction with local community groups.

The BLF was initially asked to help protect suburban bushland — a fight which was successful — and later fought to protect working class housing in inner Sydney.

As Jack Mundey, secretary of the BLF often argued, part of the job of the union was to make the city a better place to live for all working people.

This movement is now known around the world for its inspiring cooperation and success.

Environmental politics for the working class

As record-breaking hazardous air pollution levels intrude upon the working conditions of millions, unions must be at the centre of a movement for climate justice.

In the past year there has been thoughtful debate about the possibilities of a Green New Deal and a Green Job Guarantee.

In Australia, this project could build on the legacy of the Green Bans by reimagining an environmental politics for the working class.

As record-breaking hazardous air pollution levels intrude upon the working conditions of millions, unions must be at the centre of a movement for climate justice. ( AAP Images: Steve Saphore )

As the impacts of climate change are embedded in all working life, long-standing union demands for safe, healthy and decent working conditions are critical to this.

The brutal realities of the climate crisis are here.

Collective action in our workplaces and communities is our best hope of keeping each other safe now and into the future.

Freya Newman researches heat stress, labour and climate change at the Climate Justice Research Centre at the University of Technology Sydney. Elizabeth Humphrys is a political economist at the University of Technology Sydney, and recently published her first book, How Labour Built Neoliberalism, examining economic restructuring in the 1980s and 1990s in Australia. Natasha Heenan is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Economy at the University of Sydney and is a member of the Climate Justice Collective.