California became the third state in the country to implement and enforce heat safety protections for indoor workers
“She turned purple. I don’t know if you’ve seen a dead body — that’s how she looked,” said Jean Paul, a 25-year-old Taco Bell (YUM) worker, recalling a hot August day when his co-worker nearly collapsed in the restaurant’s kitchen. “I just grabbed her and leaned her against the wall.”
It was 94 degrees that day in Los Angeles County, but Paul said the temperature in the kitchen reached 104. His co-worker, a woman in her early 20s, had been working for about five hours when she started to fade, looking pale and dazed.
“We gave her some ice cream, and I took her to the dining room because the AC works in there,” Paul said.
He called his manager, asking to close the restaurant so he could take his sick co-worker to the hospital, but the answer was no. All he could do was let her rest in the dining area to recover before sending her home.
Paul himself was feeling strained that day. The restaurant was understaffed and swamped with orders, and the AC in the kitchen was broken. All the staff had to battle the heat was a fan someone had brought from home.
“[The heat] harasses you, you get desperate, like you want to leave the job because you want to do your best, but you can’t,” Paul said. “You get totally desperate.”
“Your head starts to hurt, and you lose track of where you are,” he said. Anytime that happens to him, he goes to the bathroom to splash some water on his face and place a wet towel around his neck for a few minutes before going back to work.
“I have to get back to work because if I don’t, the assembly line starts to back up,” Villagómez said.
These are the workers California’s new heat laws aim to protect.
In July, California became the third state in the nation to enforce heat protections for indoor workers, following Oregon and Minnesota.
The new regulations require employers to take action when temperatures hit 82 degrees, including by providing access to cooling areas and free drinking water and by encouraging breaks. When the temperature reaches 87 degrees — or when workers are near heat sources or wearing restrictive clothing — employers must cool the site to 82 degrees (if possible), adjust schedules to avoid high temperatures, or rotate tasks. The rules took effect on July 23, though state prisons and jails are exempt.
With California’s heat safety standards having now been in place for nearly two months, workers and policy advocates have shared what lessons can be learned as rules like these are likely to spread nationwide. The Biden-Harris Administration proposed similar federal safety regulations in July.
These protections also come at a crucial time — as summers are becoming hotter and longer. While temperatures are cooling in many areas, over 39 million people in the Southwest were still under heat alerts as late as October.
As climate change has made heat waves like this past summer’s more and more frequent, workers and advocates say the threat to people with unair-conditioned indoor jobs is growing just as much as it is for outdoor workers, even if the dangers are far less visible and often underestimated.
In a review of 66 heat-related illness enforcement investigations from 2011 to 2016, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) found that 61% of nonfatal heat-related illness cases occurred during or after work at an indoor job site.
Extreme heat can exacerbate existing health conditions, cause a heat stroke, or even lead to death. In fact, heat was the leading cause of death among weather-related phenomena on average over the last 30 years, according to the National Weather Service. OSHA’s estimates show that heat exposure killed an average of 33 workers a year from 1992-2021. But according to OSHA, the real number could be even higher.
Even in less extreme circumstances, heat can cause fatigue, nausea, headaches, and muscle cramps.
As temperatures rise, extreme heat will put more workers at risk of heat-related illness. This September, NASA said Earth experienced its hottest summer on record. And it’s not just summers that are heating up. At least 125 cities have tied or broken all-time heat records for October this year.
These record-breaking temperatures mean workers are exposed to extreme heat for longer periods than ever before.
“Heat hazards for warehouse workers has been a complaint that we’ve heard from workers from day one, and we started doing this work more than 15 years ago,” said Tim Shadix, the legal director at the Warehouse Worker Resource Center, a workers’ advocacy group in California. “But sadly, it’s only getting worse.”
Shadix said some things have improved since the rules have been implemented but more work still needs to be done.
“It sounds like some employers have made some changes in terms of improving their break areas for taking cool-down rests, being a little better at providing water or cooling equipment like vests and things like that,” Shadix said. “But even in places where I’ve heard about that happening, some of these employers have not told their employees about this new law and the fact that they have new rights under this law.”
In fact, everyone Quartz talked to said there needs to be a greater effort toward raising awareness of these new protections.
“We are training the workers about their rights, but there are more than half a million [fast-food] workers in the state. So we can’t talk to all of them, right?” said Maria Maldonado, the statewide director of the California Fast Food Workers Union. “The employers need to do this then, to train them about their rights. But it doesn’t happen.”
Even with the new rules already in place, it took a strike a few days after Paul’s co-worker passed out for the AC at Paul’s workplace to get fixed.
“As the Division works to implement these protections, we have launched an aggressive statewide campaign to recruit and expand our workforce,” said Cal/OSHA, the state agency responsible for enforcing the rules, in an emailed statement.
Robert Moutrie, a senior policy advocate at the California Chamber of Commerce, said the group’s main concern with the new rules was to make sure they worked for “both large businesses and small businesses, and that compliance is feasible for them to do.”
Key issues included the challenges businesses face in retrofitting buildings, especially for renters, to create cooling zones, as well as the need for clearer guidelines on cooling breaks.
It is estimated that the new standards will cost California employers $215 million in the first year and around $88 million each year after that, primarily for installing AC and fans or creating cool-down areas, according to an analysis by the RAND Corp.
OSHA estimated Biden’s proposal would cost businesses an average of $3,085 per location each year.
Some believe these costs could be offset by reducing productivity losses caused by heat, which account for an estimated $100 billion annually in the U.S., according to the Center for American Progress. However, not everyone is convinced these specific regulations will lead to significant savings on their own.
“There are a lot of costs for employers to absorb here in terms of the new training, the new record-keeping, potentially new structural changes to their workplaces, and potentially unlimited breaks,” Moutrie said. “And I don’t know how you do the math to say that those things add up to being a cost savings for the employer.”
He adds, however, that these laws don’t necessarily need to result in savings.
“Not everything needs to be measured by cost savings. Obviously, heat is something that we should address, and we are,” Moutrie said. “We don’t disagree that it’s important to address heat. The question is always how we do it.”
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