A film by La Isla Network partners Aryn Baker, Ed Kashi, and Tom Laffay on the effect of heat on migrant workers in Doha, Qatar has been selected for screening at the Paris Independent Film Festival. The film festival will take place from April 24-29, 2023.
Time journalist Aryn Baker, and photojournalists Ed Kashi from Talking Eyes Media and Tom Laffay worked together to create the project, which includes an article and film.
The film, “Qatar’s World Cup Building Boom: Too Hot To Work,” leads with the story of Surendra Tamang, who left Nepal in 2015 to work in constructing the stadiums and related infrastructure for the World Cup. He worked in Qatar’s hot and humid environment for five years. “During the time I was there, many people collapsed from the heat. I’ve seen some die from the heat,” he said. Now, Tamang is being treated for chronic kidney disease in a hospital in Kathmandu. There, he is joined by hundreds of others who are going through the same as he is.
The team came together years ago under the auspices of La Isla Network and CEO Jason Glaser, who had encountered chronic kidney disease of non-traditional cause among sugarcane cutters in Nicaragua. Since then, the mission of La Isla Network and its partners has been to protect workers in a changing climate through the development of systems that eliminate preventable occupational illnesses and injuries. At LIN we believe that it is paramount to highlight the health problems workers face, and to use that information to prompt private and public policy change. CKDnT is merely one of a constellation of easily-preventable health problems workers experience when private and public partners fail to implement common-sense protections in the workplace.
Ed Kashi hopes to expand his work to have a bigger focus on heat stress and the myriad health problems that result without common-sense worker protections. “I am hoping to expand on my work by finding more examples in the world of where it is becoming too hot for certain kinds of manual labor,” he said. “This film represents a pivot to the different issues connected to climate change.”
Laffay echoed Kashi’s thoughts. “These workers are economically poor and vulnerable populations. They are essentially the canary in the coal mine of climate change,” Laffay said. “This issue helped put on the map that human health is suffering due to climate change now.”
Baker notes that the issue is becoming a lot more visible, noting a conference in Portugal that will bring together international stakeholders to discuss climate change, labor, and heat. “I think we tapped into something that was already bubbling to the surface,” she said.
La Isla Network is the leading global occupational health research organization and consultancy dedicated to protecting workers in a changing climate. We are generating, supporting, and executing evidence-driven solutions to protect workers from heat and other occupationally acquired injuries and illnesses, especially those driven by climate change. In the process, we work closely with employers and workers to understand the specific contexts of their industry to adopt the gold standard of worker protections to the reality of their site-specific situation. LIN works collaboratively with decision makers and choice architects to improve working conditions, support worker health, and create tailored policies and procedures to ensure occupational protections are being adequately and effectively implemented at all levels.
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