California workplace safety rules for indoor heat protection are five years late, and the Newsom administration wanted to delay them again over state prison cost concerns. But the safety board rebelled and passed the rules anyway.
One of Amazon's newest distribution centers in Tracy, Calif., is seen during a tour Sunday, Nov. 30, 2014.
“Why, at 48, or 24, or 18 hours before this vote is happening, did this happen?” said board member Laura Stock. “It’s completely outrageous … This is an urgent public health issue.” Workers’ advocates have pleaded for a rule to be made official before temperatures rise again, but it’s not clear how that would happen this year unless the board or state lawmakers take emergency action.
The proposed rule would require employers to either try to cool workplaces that get hotter than 87 degrees indoors or take other measures to reduce the risks of heat illness. California faces a budget deficit projected at as much as $73 billion. Gov.
Stephen Knight, executive director of the advocacy group Worksafe, said he got a Wednesday night call from a state official, whose department Knight did not disclose, explaining that there was “late objection from the Department of Finance to the description of the cost.” “In the Inland Empire when it’s 100 degrees, inside is worse because we are touching all the hot products,” she said. “And the process doesn’t stop because we need to send to all the customers waiting for it.”
“It doesn’t say much about how much we value the lives and the health of those workers who suffered during those years that the was being developed, that all of a sudden at the very end of the process, the is just yanked away,” Steiger said. “Because why? Because some employer doesn’t want to comply with the law.”
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