Outside is not a workplace

Thailand’s heat index reached 59.5°C in 2025.

Bangkok recorded 51.9°C on 25 June 2026 — the “danger” tier on the government’s own scale — and forecasters expect the index to pass 52°C in the worst-affected areas this year, which is the tier above that. Extreme danger.

The Meteorological Department names the North, the Northeast and the Central region as highest risk. The public advice is to reduce outdoor activity between 11am and 3pm.

I have spent eighty-five articles on this site describing people whose entire job is outdoor activity between 11am and 3pm.

The workforce this site has already met

Article 69’s win rider. Nine hours a day on a corner, 41 trips, ฿975. The corner has no shade because the corner is a corner.

Article 84’s delivery rider. On a motorbike, in traffic, all day, classified as a partner rather than an employee.

Article 13’s street vendor. Standing over a wok.

Article 77’s market trader. A folding table on open ground, six towns a week.

Article 31’s wholesale market workers, article 40’s migrant labourers, and every construction site in a city that never stops building.

None of them can move their work indoors, and all of them are being told to avoid being outdoors during the hours they earn.

The standard, and its date

Thailand does have an occupational heat standard. It was first issued in 1976 and last revised in 2016, and it uses wet bulb globe temperature — WBGT, which combines heat, humidity and radiant load, and is the right measure.

The limits are:

30°C WBGT for heavy work. 32°C for moderate work. 34°C for light work.

Two things about that.

First, the standard sets thresholds without specifying work/rest schedules. It tells you when conditions are excessive. It does not tell an employer what to do about it — how long to work, how long to rest, in what cycle. A limit with no prescribed response is a thermometer with a legal citation.

Second, and this is the finding: peer-reviewed analysis of the standard recommends that outdoor work should be identified as an occupational heat hazard.

Which is a polite way of saying that at present it isn’t, properly.

A country recording a 59.5°C heat index has an occupational heat standard, from 1976, that researchers say does not adequately recognise working outside.

And compliance with what does exist is patchy: one study found only 55% of participants working in compliant workplaces.

Two exclusions, stacked

Here is where it compounds, and it’s the reason this article exists rather than being a weather report.

Even a perfect heat standard would not reach the people most exposed to heat.

Article 84 established that delivery riders are classified as “partners” and sit outside the Labour Protection Act, the Labour Relations Act and the Occupational Safety, Health and Environment Act — which is the statute a heat standard lives in.

Article 69’s win riders are self-employed licence-holders. Article 13’s vendors work for themselves. Article 77’s traders are their own employers.

So the exclusions stack. The standard may not properly cover outdoor work, and the outdoor workers with the highest exposure aren’t covered by the framework the standard sits in.

You could fix the 1976 standard tomorrow and it would not put a single litre of water in a win rider’s hand.

The number I don’t believe

Twenty-one heat-related deaths were recorded in Thailand in 2025 — 18 men and three women, aged between 27 and 79, average age 51.

I think that is a substantial undercount, and I want to be careful about why.

This is not a suggestion that anyone is concealing anything. It is a well-established problem with how heat mortality is recorded everywhere in the world. Heat rarely appears on a death certificate. It kills through cardiac events, renal failure and stroke in people who were already vulnerable, and those are what get written down. Countries that have run excess-mortality analysis routinely find true heat deaths many times higher than the coded figure.

Note also the demographic. Eighteen of twenty-one were men, average age 51. That is not a profile of frail elderly people caught at home. That is a profile of men working.

Twenty-one is the number Thailand can see. The relevant question is what the excess mortality analysis would show, and I could not find one.

The cruellest connection on this site

Article 58 argued that Bangkok’s malls became the public square because the outdoors is unusable for much of the year. Bangkok has now opened “heat escape rooms” across the city — municipal cooling centres, because outdoors has moved from unpleasant to dangerous.

Which is cooling becoming public infrastructure, thirty years after it became private infrastructure in the form of malls, 7-Elevens and article 61’s whole argument.

And then there is article 72.

Thai residential electricity is priced in rising bands — the more you use, the more each unit costs. Cooling is the largest discretionary electricity load in a Thai home.

Which means the household that runs the aircon hardest pays the highest marginal rate for it.

Put the pieces together. The people who work outside in 51.9°C go home to the flats with the worst insulation, and the tariff charges them the top band for cooling down. The person in the air-conditioned office building pays the same rate as everyone else for a comfort someone else is providing.

Heat in Thailand is a class issue, and the electricity tariff makes it steeper. I don’t think that was anyone’s intention and I’m certain it’s the effect.

What would actually help

Specify work/rest schedules in the standard. The thresholds exist; the response doesn’t. This is the smallest, cheapest, most obvious fix and researchers have been recommending it.

Identify outdoor work as a heat hazard explicitly. Same recommendation, same source.

And extend something to the self-employed and to platform workers, because otherwise the reform reaches the workers who already have shade.

I’d also say something less legislative. The win at the end of your soi has no shade. Article 61 asked what happens when private arrangements deliver public functions with no accountability — this is a version where nobody is even asking. Shade over a win, water, somewhere to sit, is not a policy problem. It is a hundred metres of roofing.

Common misconceptions

“It’s always been hot here.” The heat index reached 59.5°C in 2025 and Bangkok hit 51.9°C in June 2026. The government’s own scale now has an “extreme danger” tier being forecast.

“Thailand has no heat regulations.” It has had an occupational heat standard since 1976, revised in 2016, using WBGT thresholds. The gaps are the missing work/rest schedules and the treatment of outdoor work.

“Only 21 people died of heat.” That is the recorded figure. Heat mortality is systematically undercounted everywhere, and the demographic profile — mostly men, average age 51 — suggests working exposure rather than frailty.

“Air conditioning solves it.” Not for anyone working outside, and Thailand’s banded electricity tariff charges heavy users the highest rate.

“Workers can just rest when it’s hot.” A win rider resting is a win rider earning nothing. Nobody has written a rest requirement that pays for the rest.