It's happening in Florence, Milan and Bologna. At the heart of the protest: health protections and pay.

For the first time in Italy, on Wednesday 15 July 2026, food delivery riders organised a strike against the heat. The protest involved riders working for Glovo and Deliveroo, two of the country's leading home-delivery apps: in Milan and Florence the strike was called for 6pm, in Bologna for 4:30pm, while riders in Piedmont walked out the following day, Thursday 16 July, between 10am and 5pm. In Florence the protest took the form of a bicycle parade through the city centre, setting off from Via Cavour and finishing at the Fortezza da Basso.

The local mobilisation came ahead of a national appointment. On Thursday, a meeting was scheduled at the Ministry of Labour between riders' trade unions and platform associations, with whom negotiations have long been under way to secure greater protections — including employment contracts and access to social safety nets such as short-time working schemes for heat emergencies.

The crux of the protest rests on a paradox. At the beginning of July, an ordinance issued by the City of Milan had introduced a reduction or suspension of delivery assignments during the 12:30–4pm window — the peak heat period — effective until 23 September.

But for a rider, stopping means not earning. Pay is not a fixed amount; it varies according to the number of deliveries made. Those who stop working because of the heat deliver less and earn less, because riders hold occasional collaboration contracts or work as self-employed VAT-registered workers, without the protections afforded to employees. This applies to Glovo and Deliveroo, but not to Just Eat, which since 2021 has embarked on a stabilisation process by hiring its workers as employees. The riders' primary demand has therefore become to be paid by the hour, rather than on a piecework basis.

The question of safety and health concerns all workers exposed to the elements, not just riders. Extreme heat is associated with more than 4,000 workplace injuries per year in Italy, with a particularly significant impact on agriculture, construction and logistics. This is the finding of a study by the Worklimate project, conducted by the CNR and INAIL. There is also a cost in terms of productivity: the reduction attributable to the need to avoid exposure is estimated at 6.5%, rising to as high as 80% under conditions of intense physical exertion. As regards temperatures, productivity falls by up to 6.5% for every additional degree between 19.6°C and 31.8°C, particularly in activities involving high physical effort.

For this reason, many Italian regions have enacted restrictive ordinances against the heat. Restrictions are triggered when the Worklimate platform flags a high risk for workers exposed to direct sunlight during intense physical activity, imposing a work ban between 12:30 and 4pm. Notably, the ordinances work. In the summer of 2024 — the hottest year on record — injury rates in regions with ordinances were significantly lower: in construction, 21.9% lower than in regions without an ordinance; in agriculture, around 25% lower; while on the highest-risk days, the reduction in construction exceeded 40%.

An economic measure such as a short-time working scheme for climate emergencies already exists. The government has eased access to it for the period between 1 July and 31 December 2026 through a specific provision, but has done so with funding cut by more than half: €15.2 million for the second half of 2026, compared with €33 million in 2025. The problem is that riders remain entirely excluded from such protections, along with all self-employed workers, VAT-registered workers, the fishing sector and seasonal tourism workers. Despite being exposed to high and often extreme temperatures, riders are therefore shut out from wage supplementation schemes.

Several proposals exist to protect those who work in the heat, even if — it must be acknowledged — none on its own promises a definitive solution to the problem. The first concerns the introduction of a specific pay supplement on heat-alert days: a mechanism that financially recognises the greater physical effort and additional risks workers face when temperatures exceed critical thresholds. Alternatively, or in addition, an automatic allowance could be structured, whereby once certain temperature thresholds are breached, a wage top-up is triggered automatically, without the need for case-by-case negotiations between workers and companies. More distant is the prospect of climate leave, of the kind that exists in Spain.

A second area of intervention concerns the logistics of work. Mapping cooling points along delivery routes or outdoor working areas would make it possible to identify shaded, well-watered or air-conditioned locations where workers can take brief breaks to lower their body temperature and recover their strength. The crucial sticking point remains, however, the fragmentation of regional ordinances, which produces unequal treatment among workers who, depending on which region they work in, may receive very different levels of protection under identical climatic conditions. This has given rise to a proposal for a single national framework law that would establish uniform, binding criteria across the entire country.