When Gilberta Acevedo clocked into her evening shift at Taco Bell on July 4, the air was already oppressively hot. The heat wave scorching the Bay Area over the holiday brought searing temperatures into the San Jose kitchen where Acevedo grilled meat and prepared food orders. The 42-year-old felt bone-tired, plagued by pounding headaches and waves of nausea.
She recalled a recent workday when she felt overwhelmed by the urge to throw up but put her head down and finished her shift because she was one of just a handful of employees working. “I felt like my head was going to explode,” Acevedo said in Spanish. “It’s too hot. I wanted to go home, but because I need my job, I stayed.”
According to Acevedo, the store’s air conditioning system broke in early June. A month later, it still had not been fixed. On July 12, with the support of the recently formed Fast Food Workers Union, she submitted a complaint with California’s workplace health and safety department, Cal/OSHA, arguing that the extreme heat constituted a workplace hazard for employees and asking the agency to ensure the restaurant’s management took steps to mitigate the risk of heat illness and exposure. The complaint alleged that the store’s management dismissed workers’ concerns over the heat, did not train staff on heat illness prevention and did not permit staff to take rest and water breaks as needed outside. Over the sweltering holiday week, temperatures in San Jose hovered in the mid-90s and 100s. Acevedo said a thermometer inside the restaurant displayed 101 degrees on July 4. Acevedo, who is diabetic, worried that the extreme heat could worsen her medical condition.
Now, employees like Acevedo working in stiflingly hot indoor spaces will have an added layer of protection from the blazing temperatures that have blanketed California this summer. Under new regulations that began on July 24, employers must provide workers with safeguards to reduce the risk of heat illness when temperatures exceed 82 degrees, including water, cooling areas, scheduling rotations and increased access to breaks to rest and recover from the heat. Employees can file a complaint with Cal/OSHA if they believe their workplaces are not complying with the standards.
The newly adopted regulations are the culmination of years of hard-fought advocacy. Labor and occupational safety groups have been pressing state officials for more than a decade to enact stronger protections for workers as climate change intensifies extreme heat. In 2016, the state legislature passed a bill requiring Cal/OSHA to develop indoor heat standards to minimize workers’ exposure to heat illness and injury. But administrative delays, disagreements over the rules and the pandemic resulted in a lengthy wait for the new policy that was finally enacted this year.
“After more than eight years of relentless advocacy, we are relieved that the indoor heat protections are now finally in effect in California,” said Lorena Gonzalez, President of the California Labor Federation, which has lobbied for the indoor heat standards, in a statement to El Tímpano. “This long overdue victory for workers cannot be overstated: these protections from extreme heat will save countless lives.”
In a response to Acevedo’s complaint, which was filed before the new indoor heat protections went into effect, Cal/OSHA opened an inspection into the facility on July 15, which remains ongoing. Employers found in violation of the agency’s health and safety standards, including the new heat regulations, may be subject to penalties, including fines.
In a July 26 emailed statement, a spokesperson for Taco Bell said the location’s air conditioning unit was working. “The safety and well-being of team members is our top priority at Taco Bell,” the spokesperson said. “The franchise owner and operator of this location is currently looking into and working to address any team member concerns.”
The new heat regulations could affect an estimated 1.4 million Californians who work in indoor settings. Workers and labor advocates who testified at a May 2023 hearing in support of the regulation emphasized that people employed in the manufacturing, warehouse and restaurant industries are especially vulnerable to heat exposure on the job and are likely to be among those most affected by the rule’s new safeguards against heat illness. As Stephen Knight, the executive director of Worksafe, an Oakland-based workers’ rights organization that advocated for the standards, explained: “People toiling in the warehouse industry and the fast food industry are the workers at risk.”
One of the workforces most affected locally by the high heat are fast food workers. Throughout California and the Bay Area, fast food workers have been especially hard-hit by rising temperatures, according to Maria Maldonado, statewide director of the California Fast Food Workers Union. There are an estimated 550,000 people working in fast food restaurants throughout California, a sector predominantly made up of Latino employees. While indoor heat has long posed challenges for fast food workers, consecutive years of record-breaking heat have highlighted the problem, Maldonado said, causing employees to stage protests at restaurants up and down the state.
“It’s been very difficult the last few years because it’s super hot in California, and for people working in the kitchen, it’s difficult because sometimes they are working in kitchens that are more than 100 degrees,” Maldonado said. “Workers have been speaking out about the need of employers providing a safe place to work. All over California there have been strikes about the heat.”
Advocates stress that the newly extended protections could save lives.
Minimizing the risk of heat illness has become an urgent public health concern as climate change intensifies both the length and severity of heat waves. Heat stress already ranks as the leading cause of weather-related deaths in the U.S. Exposure to extreme heat can result in heatstroke, leading to organ failure and heart attacks. Each year, around 1,220 people die from extreme heat, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and nearly 460 Californians over the last decade have died from extreme heat exposure. While there is limited data available about the California workforce and extreme heat mortality, a 2021 analysis by the Rand Corporation found that extreme heat killed 20 workers in California from 2010 to 2017, seven of whom worked indoors.
The Biden administration has sought to protect employees from hazardous heat in indoor and outdoor workplaces through recently proposed federal standards. However, the rules put forward by the administration could face roadblocks if Democrats lose the White House in November, as some outspoken Republicans have criticized the proposal. It is also unclear how—or if—the recent Supreme Court’s decision curbing the power of federal agencies to create rules could hamper regulators’ ability to enforce the proposed regulations.
In the absence of federal heat standards, the newly adopted rules mean that California is one of the most protective states for the labor rights of indoor workers exposed to extreme heat. It is one of just three states nationally to regulate indoor heat protections for workers.
“As temperatures continue to soar across the state, we are thrilled that the indoor heat regulations are now in effect in California,” said Suzanne Teran, associate director of the Labor Occupational Health Program at UC Berkeley. “Access to water, rest, shade and cooler work areas may seem like basic protections, but this standard is the result of years of advocacy.”
For advocates, a years-long battle to codify heat protections
For advocates, the path to victory has been long. The newly adopted protections date back to 2016, when California lawmakers passed a bill directing Cal/OSHA to develop an indoor heat rule by 2019. But that timeline was significantly delayed over disagreements between industry groups and labor advocates over the details of the regulations, and the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
Five years after the 2019 deadline, a workplace safety board was set to approve the rule in March 2024. However, state officials directed the board to remove the rule from the agenda after Governor Gavin Newsom’s administration expressed concerns that the standards could cost billions in prisons and jails. The board ultimately agreed on a version of the rule that exempted correctional facilities and passed it in late June. A month later—eight years after the legislature’s passage of the indoor heat law—the rule was approved in a mandatory review by a state administrative office and put into effect.
In addition to the actions an employer must take when temperatures indoors reach 82 degrees, employers will also need to monitor workers for signs of heat illness, cool down worksites and offer employees breaks and shorter shifts to cool down if needed if temperatures rise higher than 87 degrees. While proponents have expressed enthusiasm for the enactment of the long-awaited rule, some have also raised concerns about the temperature threshold triggering the protections.
Knight said the rule’s baseline temperatures “are too high. That’s the bottom line.” Instead of a cutoff at 82 degrees, Knight suggested a 78-degree trigger for the rules to go into effect. At the same time, he acknowledged the historic nature of the regulations and the long fight to get them across the finish line. “We have been working on this for more than a decade,” he explained. “We have never stopped fighting. We will work to monitor the agency and monitor enforcement and protection, and we will come back and point out that it needs to be lowered. But this literally just got passed after 10 years of work.”
Enforcement may prove challenging for a state agency in the midst of a staffing crisis. A recent investigation by the Sacramento Bee found Cal/OSHA to have an overall vacancy rate of 34%, leaving employees overburdened with cases and straining the agency’s ability to respond to employee complaints and investigate allegations of workplace negligence in a timely fashion. “Cal/OSHA is too slow, overburdened,” said Knight. “And whether Cal/OSHA responds or not, too many employers feel like they are running a kingdom, not a workplace. And they are taken aback by any suggestion that they don’t have absolute authority over everything.”
In addition to enforcement challenges, Maria Maldonado of the Fast Food Workers Union emphasized that workers need to receive training from their employers on their labor rights, the new indoor heat regulations and how to identify and respond to illness from heat exposure.
“I think that workers are going to continue pushing for better conditions at work,” Maldonado added. “And when they learn about their rights, they will understand that they shouldn’t accept the conditions that employers care more about profit than the health of the workers.”
