California workplace safety officials will try again to pass a long-delayed rule to protect indoor workers from extreme heat this summer — other than correctional officers and other prison staff.
The Division of Occupational Safety and Health, or Cal/OSHA, announced this week that it plans to revise a proposed indoor heat rule for all workers statewide to carve out “state and local correctional facilities.”
That would temporarily resolve cost concerns raised by Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration, and allow the rule to be formally approved this summer for all other workers. The rule is intended to benefit those who work indoors without air conditioning as rising temperatures increase Californians’ risks of heat illness. The industries most likely to be affected include warehouses, restaurants and manufacturing.
The proposed rulerequires 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, such as slowing down production, shifting schedules or mandating more breaks.
California has had a heat illness prevention rule for outdoor workers since 2005, when it rushed regulations into place after the deaths of four farmworkers. If the new rule is finalized, California would join two other states that have an indoor heat workplace rule. A 2016 state law set a 2019 deadline for the rule.
Eric Berg, a Cal/OSHA deputy chief, announced the new plans at a meeting of an independent workplace regulations board, a month after that board was originally expected to approve the rule.
But in an eleventh-hour move the evening before the scheduled vote, the administration withdrew a required fiscal sign-off, saying that the rule could cost the state prison system billions more dollars than the workplace agencies had estimated. That forced the state to miss an administrative deadline at the end of March to implement the rule.
Speaking to the Occupational Safety and Health Standards Board today, Berg said the agency found a time extension in state law that will allow it to revise the rule to exempt prisons and add the administration’s fiscal sign-off. The revised rule is likely to take at least a few weeks to be approved because it requires a 15-day public comment period and needs to be voted on again by the safety board.
“We are committed to collaborating with the board and board staff to keep an expedited timeline to ensure Californians have protections in place from indoor heat hazards this summer,” Berg said.
Cal/OSHA, Berg said, will next separately propose a new rule to address heat for jail and prison workers. That process will likely require a separate cost analysis and public hearing, and could take anywhere from a few months to a few years.
He said he doesn’t anticipate the agency will make further changes to the general indoor heat rule, which has already undergone several revisions since Cal/OSHA began developing it in 2017.
But employers’ groups during today’s meeting continued to urge changes, calling the proposed rule both confusing and expensive.
“To the extent that the Department of Corrections has the capacity to have their concerns addressed, good for them,” said Bryan Little, director of labor affairs with the California Farm Bureau. “Sometimes I am concerned that perhaps some of the concerns that we’ve raised have not been heard or acted on in any meaningful way.”
Workers’ advocates said they were most interested in seeing the rule on track to become official this summer, but were disappointed to see correctional workers left out.
“It’s a huge concern that prison workplaces are being excluded from the heat standard, leaving not just guards but also nurses, janitors and many other prison workers across California unprotected from heat, not to mention all the incarcerated workers vulnerable to those dangerous conditions as well,” said AnaStacia Wright, an attorney at the advocacy group Worksafe.
The administration has not provided a public explanation of its prison cost estimates, or why its concerns were discovered so late.
Both the finance and corrections departments have said only that the labor agency’s estimate — about $1 million in costs in the rule’s first year — was inaccurate but neither has stated exactly how much they believe it will cost instead.
Corrections spokesperson Albert Lundeen said last month the rule would require “immediate infrastructure investments in CDCR facilities across the state and would require the department to immediately request the Legislature to appropriate billions of dollars for extensive capital improvements.”
In response to a pending public records request filed by CalMatters for the prison cost estimates, Finance officials have said they will withhold some records under an exception for “records that are part of the Governor’s and Director of Finance’s deliberative process” over budget and policy decisions. That decision was made by Finance senior staff counsel Donna Ferebee.
The growing risks of extreme heat have for years confronted the Corrections department, which has several prisons in desert towns. State prisons are mostly cooled using evaporative coolers or fans, Lundeen said.
A project to install evaporative cooling units at the California Institution for Men in Chino is currently slated to cost the state $18 million for planning and construction. A project at the Ironwood State Prison in Blythe to replace an old cooling system with heating, ventilation and air conditioning has been under construction since 2018 and is estimated to cost $187 million.
For private industry, a 2021 RAND Corp. economic impact report estimated the costs of the indoor heat rule on employers statewide to total $215 million in the first year and about $88 million annually afterward, mostly for employers to install AC or fans or provide cool-down areas. The analysis also stated employers would save money because the rule would cut indoor workplace heat injuries by 40% by 2030.
CalMatters is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics.
