LAST year, at the height of the summer, as the result of a campaign mounted on social media, good-hearted young people toured parks and building sites, giving out bottles of iced water and even ice creams to laborers working under the merciless noonday sun.

No doubt, the youngsters will be doing the same thing this year. This time however, they also have the support of the National Society for Human Rights, which has made it clear that it will pursue any organization, be it private or municipal, that requires or allows its employees to work in these dangerous conditions.

The society has said that it intends to insist that local labor inspectors in all parts of Saudi Arabia enforce what is both international legislation and the laws of the Kingdom. It must be hoped that the inspectors will do their duty.

This problem needs however to be addressed more widely than simply going to a construction site or a local authority maintenance office and telling supervisors if they are breaking the law.

At its most fundamental level, the workers themselves need to be made aware of their rights under the laws of Saudi Arabia. Some of them may have limited literacy, so ensuring that, along with the other documentation they need to be here in the Kingdom, they are also handed a leaflet explaining their rights under labor legislation, may not be the complete answer.

There could however be a change made in our legislation, obliging an employer to make every new arrival fully aware of his rights in an initial briefing, before he begins his labors. That briefing should include the vital information that this is the law of the Kingdom and no employer has the right to tell anyone to ignore it. Moreover, bosses who try to order their men to work in any dangerous conditions, not just the midday sun, are guilty of an offense for which they should be punished.

Then there is the need to brief the existing work force, especially the immediate supervisors. These foremen will probably take the view that when they first started out working here, they were told to get on with their job, whatever the conditions. Therefore they see no good reason not to treat the men below them the same way that they were once treated. Besides, there is probably a feeling among many ordinary laborers, that it is somehow not manly to avoid the worst of the sun. They will therefore foolishly press on with what they have to do, regardless, hoping that their colleagues and supervisors will think the better of them because of this.

All of this however is to ignore the role of the employers in this matter. It is easy to demonize them as being interested only in profits and not caring how their work force is treated. It is easy, but it is entirely wrong. Certainly there are bad employers here, as everywhere else in the world, who willingly and deliberately exploit and mistreat their staff. But they are the exception. Behind any well-run business is a businessman who knows that if he treats his staff fairly and with consideration, those employees will reward him, not simply with better performance and productivity, but also with their loyalty. Thus when a company has perhaps a big job to be completed within a tight deadline, employees will go that extra mile to help out and make sure the piece of work is a success.

Besides, in the case of a laborer who falls ill because of excessive exposure to the midday sun, the employer probably faces the loss of a skilled worker, who must be replaced from somewhere until he has recovered. It may also be that the cost of medical treatment will fall on the employer or his insurer, to whom the company will perhaps have to pay a higher premium next year. Put simply, it pays an employer to treat his or her staff well.

Maybe a big contribution to ending work in the hottest part of the day could be made if ordinary citizens, not just the young people with their bottles of water and ice creams, but anyone who sees a laborer dangerously exposed to sunlight, should use their mobiles to dial the local labor office immediately and report what they have seen. For good measure, it might be an idea to call the official the following day, to ensure that he has done his job and checked. Thus hopefully, within a year or two, the scandal of seeing men laboring in unacceptable conditions, will have become a thing of the past.