California accelerates indoor heat protections amid scorching summer weather

SACRAMENTO, CA — California residents who work indoors are getting immediate protection from extreme heat as much of the state experiences warm weather this week.

California has had heat standards for outdoor workers since 2005, but the state announced Wednesday that it had finalized a set of rules for indoor workers after an expedited review. The state’s Occupational Safety and Health Standards Board approved the rules last month, but they still had to be reviewed for compliance with the law.

“These regulations provide protections for workers across California and help employers prepare for the challenges of rising indoor temperatures,” said Debra Lee, chief of the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health.

California is one of the few states responding to the growing impacts of climate change and extreme heat with safety standards for workers. Earlier this month, the Biden administration proposed federal rules to protect indoor and outdoor workers from heat exposure as extreme heat, already the biggest weather-related killer in the U.S., becomes even more dangerous.

California standards require that indoor workplaces be cooled to below 87 degrees Fahrenheit when workers are present and to below 82 degrees in areas where workers wear protective clothing or are exposed to radiant heat, such as furnaces. Workplaces without air conditioning can use fans, misters and other methods to reduce room temperatures.

The rules offer companies solutions if they cannot cool their workplaces sufficiently. In those cases, employers must provide employees with water, breaks, places to cool down, cooling vests or other means to prevent them from overheating.

But even with temporary solutions, businesses worry about the costs of complying, especially small businesses that don’t have a storefront or are housed in old buildings, said Robert Moutrie, senior policy counsel at the California Chamber of Commerce.

“The simplest answer to this regulation is AC, and that is a costly investment,” Moutrie said. “If you are a small business and you don’t own your structure, you can’t make changes like creating a new space to cool down.”

The rules have been in development since 2016, but have been delayed in part by the COVID pandemic. The Worker Safety Board has requested that the rulemaking be expedited. A standard review would have delayed the rulemaking until the fall, leaving workers largely unprotected from the summer heat.

The regulations apply to most indoor workplaces, including classrooms and even delivery vehicles. But state regulators exempted prisons and local correctional facilities after Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration predicted they would cost the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation billions of dollars to implement.

The administration plans to create a separate settlement for the tens of thousands of workers in the state’s 33 state prisons, protection camps and local jails, a process that could take a year, if not longer.

In 2021, the Department of Health and Human Services reported that there were 1,602 heat-related deaths nationwide, which is likely an undercount because health care providers are not required to report them. In 2023, HHS reported that there were 2,302 heat-related deaths. It is not clear how many of these deaths were work-related, either indoors or outdoors.

Meanwhile, global temperatures in June reached record highs for the 13th consecutive month.

“This is really one of the biggest safety issues that we see for workers in California across a wide range of industries,” said Tim Shadix, legal director at the Warehouse Worker Resource Center, which lobbied for the protections. “And it’s only going to get worse with climate change and hotter summers.”

This article is produced by KFF Health Newswho publishes California Healthlinean editorially independent service of the California Healthcare Foundation.

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.