Delivering in 43 Degrees

It’s the kind of day where the air feels thick before you even step outside.

The morning forecast is already grim – heat building fast, a high in the forties, overnight temperatures that barely count as relief. In parts of Australia this is a feature of the summer, arriving with the same blunt certainty as magpies in spring. Climate agencies and health authorities have been warning for years that extreme heat is one of our most lethal hazards, and that as the continent warms, heat extremes will become more frequent and more severe.

And yet, the food still needs to be delivered.

I’m thinking of a rider I’ll call Sam, a composite, drawn from the stories delivery workers tell again and again, in different accents, on different streets, with the same tired pragmatism. Sam is not a hero, not a symbol. He’s a person trying to make rent, to keep up with bills, to stay afloat in an economy that increasingly treats “flexibility” as a synonym for risk that someone else doesn’t have to carry.

On days like this, his work becomes an endurance event.

He straps on a helmet, checks the tyres, wipes sweat from the screen of his phone. The app pings. The map lights up. The timer starts. He knows the logic of it intimately – every pause costs money, every rejected job might cost future jobs, every detour might cost a rating. In the language of platform work, it’s all framed as choice, you’re free to log on, free to log off, but anyone who has watched a rider hover outside a shopping strip at lunchtime understands what that “freedom” often means in practice – freedom to absorb danger alone.

A customer taps a few buttons in an air-conditioned lounge room. A meal appears at their door. The heat, the physical hazard, the dehydration risk, the traffic gamble, the aggressive driver, the sunburn, the fatigue, is outsourced to the person on the bike.

That is the invisible issue here – climate risk is increasingly being borne by the people with the least power to refuse it.

Australia’s safety regulators are clear on one foundational point – working in heat can be hazardous and can cause harm.

Under Australia’s work health and safety framework, responsibility doesn’t vanish just because someone is labelled a “contractor” or “self-employed”. The concept of “worker” is broad, and explicitly includes contractors, a person can even be both a worker and a business conducting work at the same time.

Safe Work Australia goes further in the gig context – it explicitly treats a delivery rider as a worker when they are carrying out work for a platform (and/or the food outlet), and it places duties on platforms and food outlets as persons conducting a business of undertaking (PCBUs) to do what’s reasonably practicable to ensure health and safety, including consulting and coordinating where duties overlap.

That matters, because the hazard on a 43-degree day is physiological strain that can tip, quietly and quickly, into heat illness. It is reduced concentration and slower reaction time in traffic. It is a body trying to cool itself while doing exertion in radiant heat, often with limited access to shade, toilets, or cold water.

And there is a myth we cling to, perhaps because it is convenient – that there’s some clear “too hot” rule where the work must stop. In reality, Australian guidance says there is no single legal “stop-work temperature”, because heat risk depends on humidity, airflow, exertion, acclimatisation and more.

In many conventional workplaces, this duty has evolved into practice – heat policies, shaded rest areas, scheduled breaks, cooled water, job rotation, rescheduling heavy tasks to cooler hours. Sometimes enterprise agreements embed “heat clauses”, sometimes site managers make judgment calls.

But gig delivery is structurally different. The “workplace” is the street, and the “supervisor” is an app.

Here is where the story stops being merely about weather and becomes about power.

SafeWork NSW, writing specifically about food delivery, is unusually blunt about something most riders already understand in their bones – features of the app and the delivery process can create health and safety risks, including how and when riders are required to access the app, and whether delivery times are set in ways that account for real-world speeds and traffic conditions.

Read that again. The app itself can be a hazard multiplier.

On a mild day, a tight delivery timer is just stress. On a severe heat day, it becomes a prompt to skip water, to push through dizziness, to take traffic risks, to treat “rest” as failure. If you are paid per delivery, the economic incentive is not “be safe”, it is “keep moving”.

This is not speculation. Australian research interviewing platform food delivery workers in Melbourne found that riders are routinely exposed to hazardous traffic, extreme weather, unsafe hours, and locations, while safety remains a low priority for both platforms and governments.

When Sam tells you he can’t “just take a break”, he is saying the structure of the system makes refusing unsafe work financially punishing.

That’s what “choice” looks like in a piece-rate economy.

We talk about heatwaves in a strangely moral way – as if they are tests of character. Drink more water. Check on your neighbours. Don’t exercise in the hottest part of the day.

All good advice, if you have the privilege to follow it.

What happens when your income depends on doing exactly what public health advises against?

On a 43-degree day, the customer has options. They can cook. They can wait. They can choose a later delivery window. They can decide that a craving is not worth another human being’s heat exposure.

But the platform’s commercial promise, “fast delivery, always available”, is built on the assumption that someone else will carry the risk of fulfilling it, even as heat becomes more frequent and more intense.

We already know what “good” looks like. We just haven’t demanded it here.

The basic components of heat safety are not mysterious. Regulators list the kinds of measures that reduce risk – rescheduling work, providing rest breaks, hydration, shade, and redesigning tasks so the heat load is manageable.

In platform delivery, those controls translate into practical, enforceable design choices:

1. A genuine right to pause without penalty.

Not a “you can log off if you like” fiction, but a system where heat-safety pauses do not downgrade access to future work, do not trigger algorithmic punishment, and do not silently reduce earnings through hidden scoring.

2. Heat-indexed delivery settings.

If the platform can adjust pricing minute-by-minute, it can adjust safety settings too – longer delivery times, reduced batching, automated warnings, and clear triggers for suspending service during severe conditions.

3. Payment that doesn’t force risk-taking.

Piece rates push workers to gamble. A baseline hourly floor (or equivalent minimum standard) changes the calculus – it makes rest possible.

4. Real safety infrastructure.

Water access, cooling options, PPE suitable for sun exposure, safe pick-up zones, and injury/incident support that doesn’t depend on pleading with a chatbot.

None of this requires us to invent a new moral philosophy. It requires us to apply principles we already claim to hold – that a worker’s health is not collateral damage, that safety is a duty, not a perk, that “flexibility” is not permission to externalise hazard.

Australia is not frozen in time on this. Significant reforms and policy work are already in play.

And in late 2025, the Transport Workers Union announced an agreement with Uber Eats and DoorDash aimed at minimum safety-net pay rates and conditions for delivery drivers and riders, subject to Fair Work Commission approval, a sign that standards-setting for platform delivery is becoming politically and industrially unavoidable.

But more is needed to change the legal landscape in a way that reaches the street, the heat, the bike lane, the moment the body starts to tremble and the app keeps pinging.

There is a temptation, when confronted with this problem, to reach for a simple fix – pay more when it’s hot.

But even that can be ethically treacherous.

In Italy, Glovo faced backlash for “heat bonus” schemes that critics argued incentivised riders to work in dangerous temperatures, the company paused aspects of the scheme, and legal and union pressure pushed the issue of heat risk into formal dispute.

The lesson is not “never compensate risk”. The lesson is that if the only way a worker can pay bills is by accepting danger, then “hazard pay” can become a pressure mechanism rather than a protection.

A better model is not “pay more to ride in unsafe heat.” It’s “make it safe to stop, and ensure workers aren’t financially destroyed when stopping is the responsible choice.”

“But they’re contractors.” So what?

This is often a sticking point, and it gets stuck because the contractor label is doing cultural work. It allows the rest of us to quietly believe that the rider’s risk is a private decision, like choosing to go for a jog on a hot day.

But under WHS thinking, that’s not how work risk is meant to operate. The duty framework is built for precisely these modern arrangements, contractual chains, multiple duty-holders, blurred lines, and it insists that responsibility follows control and practical capacity, not just legal branding.

When a system profits from a particular pattern of work, it cannot wash its hands of the hazards created by that pattern, especially when those hazards are getting worse because the climate is changing.

In debates about climate adaptation, we talk a lot about sea walls and emergency warnings and resilient infrastructure. All important.

But the most intimate adaptation question is often this – who gets to reduce exposure, and who has exposure forced upon them?

On extreme heat days, wealth buys insulation. Air-conditioning buys relief. Flexible jobs buy the ability to shift hours. Home ownership buys thermal stability and control over the building you live in.

We are already seeing the human costs of precarious delivery work in other ways – road deaths, injuries, and the broader vulnerability of riders. Extreme heat pours fuel onto that risk landscape.

What would a just society do?

A just society wouldn’t demand that Sam choose, day after day, between heat illness and rent.

It would insist on minimum standards that make the safe choice survivable – safety pauses without penalty, baseline pay that doesn’t force speed, enforceable heat protocols, transparent algorithms, accident insurance that doesn’t depend on goodwill, and a regulator posture that treats app design as part of the workplace.

And it would recognise something we pretend not to know – that the gig economy is a growing part of how modern life functions, how meals arrive, how errands get done, how convenience is manufactured.

If that is our model, then the ethics of climate risk aren’t abstract. They arrive in a push notification at 2:06pm, on a day when the asphalt shimmers, and the body is already behind on water.

You can call that “flexibility” if you like.

But on the street, in 43 degrees, it looks like this – a person pedalling through heat that’s becoming normal, so someone else doesn’t have to.

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