California’s Occupational Health and Safety (Cal/OSHA) Standards Board voted Thursday afternoon to implement rules protecting indoor workers from extreme heat.
California now joins just two other states, Oregon and Minnesota, that protect people who work indoors in facilities like warehouses, restaurants and refineries. The state estimates the new rule will apply to about 1.4 million people who work indoors in conditions that can easily become dangerously hot.
“It’s an urgent public health crisis, the impact of heat on health, as we’re seeing across the country,” says Laura Stock, a former Cal/OSHA Standards Board member and the director of the Labor Occupational Health Program at the University of California, Berkeley. “There was an urgent need for this regulation. It’s in line with what we already have in California, which is the recognition that heat is a life-threatening exposure hazard.”
Now, when indoor temperatures hit 82 degrees Fahrenheit, employers will be required to provide employees with cool places to take breaks. Above 87 degrees, they’ll need to change how people work. That could mean shifting work activities to cooler times of the day, for example, or cooling down workspaces using tools like fans or air conditioning.
The rule could be implemented by early August, says Eric Berg, Cal/OSHA’s deputy chief of health and research and standards.
That can’t come quickly enough for workers facing dangerously hot weather already, says Tim Shadix, legal director of the Warehouse Worker Resource Center, a worker advocacy group based in Southern California.
“In the worst places we’ve seen, you know, in the summer,…
Read the full article here
