Warehouses in California can get very hot. The state just passed a rule to protect indoor workers in industries such as warehousing, restaurants or manufacturing from the effects of high temperatures.
Virginie Goubier/AFP via Getty Images
hide title
Switch title
Virginie Goubier/AFP via Getty Images
The California Occupational Health and Safety (Cal/OSHA) Standards Board voted Thursday afternoon to implement regulations to protect indoor workers from extreme heat.
California now joins several other states, including Oregon and Minnesota, in protecting people who work indoors in facilities such as warehouses, restaurants and refineries. The state estimates the new rule will apply to about 1.4 million people who work indoors in conditions that tend to get very hot.
“As we are seeing across the country, this is an urgent public health crisis, the health impacts of heat,” said former Cal/OSHA Standards Committee member and director of the UC Labor Occupational Health Program. Laura Stock said. “This regulation is urgently needed. It is consistent with what we already know in California, which is recognizing that heat is a life-threatening exposure hazard.
Employers will now be required to provide workers with a cool place to rest when indoor temperatures reach 82 degrees Fahrenheit. Over 87 degrees, they need to change the way people work. For example, this might mean moving work activities to cooler times of the day or using tools such as fans or air conditioners to cool down the workspace.
Eric Berg, associate director for health, research and standards at the California Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Cal/OSHA), said the rule could be implemented in early August.
That can’t come soon enough for workers already facing dangerously hot weather, said Tim Shadix, legal director of the Warehouse Workers Resource Center, a Southern California-based workers’ rights group.
“In the worst places we’ve seen, you know, in the summer, those workplaces, they’re kind of like tin cans baking in the sun,” Shaddix said. “We hope there will be no further delays and that employees and employers will be informed of these new protections before the end of the summer.”
In early June, temperatures hit record highs across the state, with some inland areas home to thousands of warehouses seeing temperatures well above 100 degrees. Scientists from the World Weather Attribution Group recently determined that heat waves in June are longer, warmer and 35 times more likely to occur than in a world without human-caused climate change.
Sarah Fee worked in a warehouse in Southern California’s Inland Empire. With outdoor temperatures often hovering at or above 90 degrees in the summer, many warehouses are just as hot as outside, sometimes even hotter.
“I would get off work and my shirt would be soaked in sweat and I would feel really sick,” she said. “Not enough fans.”
Heat rules vary nationwide
There are no state regulations to protect outdoor or indoor workers from dangerously high temperatures. Under the federal Occupational Health and Safety Administration’s general duty clause, employers must provide a workplace “free from recognized hazards,” including heat, but worker advocates point out that guidance on heat-specific risks is difficult to enforce and rarely used. .
In the absence of strong federal guidance, individual cities such as Phoenix, Arizona, and five states including Oregon, Washington and Minnesota have enacted their own regulations giving outdoor workers, such as farmworkers or construction workers, access to water. s right.
But others explicitly blocked such rules. Earlier this year, Miami-Dade County, Florida, was about to propose a local rule to address heat risks for outdoor workers. But Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a state law prohibiting cities or counties from setting their own heating rules.
OSHA has been working on a nationwide heat rule to protect indoor and outdoor workers, but the process could take years. Recently, a draft was sent to the White House for review.
Jill Rosenthal, director of public health policy at the Center for American Progress, said California’s adoption of the indoor heating rule “is a really important step and sends a signal to other states and employers that this is really something to be concerned about.” “We hope to see more countries adopt such policies again for health reasons and economic reasons.”
Meanwhile, workers in California and elsewhere have been injured and sometimes killed as a result of exposure to the heat.
The road to indoor heatstroke prevention is long
In 2016, California lawmakers approved a bill that tasked the California Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Cal/OSHA) to develop a rule to protect indoor workers from heat exposure, a reference to the state’s 2005 law protecting outdoor workers. matching package. The state was scheduled to enact the rule in 2019, but conflicts over its scope have slowed progress on the rule for years. At issue is which industries the protection measures will cover, what actions will be required once certain temperatures are reached and which businesses will be required to proactively cool workplaces that are too hot.
The text of the rule was finalized earlier this year. The Standards Board was scheduled to vote on the rule in March 2024, but the night before the vote, the board learned that the California Department of Finance had raised concerns about the cost of the state’s compliance with the rule, specifically about the effort required to comply. California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) Compliance. The department operates more than 30 adult state-owned facilities across the state, most of which are cooled by fans or evaporative coolers rather than air conditioning.
At the March meeting, board members expressed frustration with last-minute delays and voted to approve the rule in a token vote.
The new version of the rules adopted Thursday now does not include CDCR. The standards committee said it would work to develop a separate pathway to address the safety of these workers. But AnaStacia Nicol Wright of workers’ rights group WorkSafe fears the process could drag out, putting thousands of staff and prisoners at risk for another summer or even longer. “Incarcerated workers are also employees under California labor laws,” she said at the meeting. “These workers are at risk of heatstroke and dehydration because they work in older, poorly ventilated buildings with little to no protection against heatstroke.”
Some employer groups remain opposed to elements of the rule. Rob Moutrie of the California Chamber of Commerce noted that many small businesses that lease facilities have no control over their own infrastructure, making it difficult or impossible to provide the cooling space required by the new rules.
Bryan Little, director of labor affairs for the California Farm Bureau, noted that groups like his share similar concerns with correctional facilities that the installation and use of “engineered controls” such as air conditioners to cool workplaces may High costs will be incurred. “As an employer advocate, I want to know how to be heard,” he told the meeting.
The rule could be implemented by late summer. The sooner, Stock said, the better.
“I think the urgency of this is very clear,” she said. “The effects of climate change on temperatures will only exacerbate exposure, and temperatures will continue to rise over the coming months.”
