Italy's heatwave exposes the invisible workers holding it together

This week, delivery riders in Milan, Bologna and Florence went on strike to demand better protection during the heatwave gripping Italy. The BBC reported that the action was driven by concerns about health and wages—workers exposed to temperatures that have prompted Greenpeace and the CGIL union to stage protests outside Rome's Colosseum, melting ice statues to illustrate the human cost of the heat. The strikes are a small gesture against a much larger phenomenon: the way Italy's economy now depends on workers whose labour is rendered invisible by the very systems that exploit it.

Italy is not unique in this regard. Gig economy workers across Europe face similar pressures. But Italy's particular vulnerability lies in its demography and its geography. The country is ageing; the young are emigrating; the workforce is shrinking. Those who remain are often migrants or precarious workers with few protections. They deliver food to office workers in air-conditioned rooms, clean hotels in cities choking with tourism, tend fields in the South during droughts. When the heat rises, they have nowhere to hide.

The strikes in Milan and Bologna are not merely about wages or working conditions, though those matter. They are a signal that Italy's model of economic growth—built on low-cost labour, tourism density, and the outsourcing of discomfort to the most vulnerable—is becoming unsustainable. The heatwave is not an aberration; it is the new normal. The workers who keep the country running are beginning to refuse the terms on which they have been asked to do so.

Italy's government has pledged action on climate and worker protections. Yet the strikes suggest that the gap between policy and reality remains vast. A country that cannot protect its delivery riders from extreme heat, that must stage ice-statue protests to make the point visible, has not yet reckoned with what climate stress actually means for those without the option of staying indoors.