California is finally set to approve a workplace safety rule to protect employees from excessive heat indoors. Why is it five years late?
We’re a big state with big challenges. Each morning we explain the top issues and how Californians are trying to solve them.One weekly email, all the Golden State newsGet the news that matters to all Californians. Start every week informed.Inland Empire Amazon Workers United founder Sara Fee in front of the Warehouse Worker Resource Center in Ontario on Feb. 13, 2024.
To understand why a state rule has taken so long — even with lives at stake — is to take a journey through the byzantine world of administrative rulemaking in California. the option to adopt an indoor heat rule targeted at certain industries, but the agency wrote a broad one, prompting immediate pushback from a wide swath of employers;
The state hired two different contractors to complete the economic assessment, and didn’t submit the final study until September 2021; steps: First, to cool the worksite, if feasible. If not, employers would have to adjust work schedules, slow production, allow more breaks or rotate workers through assignments. As a last resort, they’d have to provide personal fans or cooling vests. Neither advocates for workers nor employers are satisfied with the proposed rule. Workers want to require lower temperatures.
Inland Empire Amazon Workers United founder Sara Fee in front of the Warehouse Worker Resource Center in Ontario on Feb 13, 2024. Photo by Elisa Ferrari for CalMatters for a general heat standard — indoors and outdoors — as early as the 1980s, said Kevin Riley, director of the Labor Occupational Safety and Health Program at UCLA.
The agency only recently began separately counting safety complaints that mention indoor heat; it received 194 such complaints in 2022 and 549 last year. Leyva, backed by the California Labor Federation, tried in 2017 and 2021 to exempt Cal/OSHA from conducting economic impact studies, saying they slow down regulations that are needed for workers’ safety. Both times the bill cleared the Senate, then died. Leyva blamed business interests hostile to new regulations.
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