When Nicholas Reiger goes to work on hot summer mornings, he's filled with a sense of dread.
"The second I get on the road to work, I see the place and I'm like, 'Oh, I wish I could just turn around and go home right now,'" he said.
Reiger works for a shipping company outside Philadelphia, where he unloads packages from a trailer onto a conveyor belt that moves them into a warehouse.
The job is physically demanding on any day, especially when he's dealing with large, heavy packages like memory foam mattresses. But when the temperatures heat up, the job can become unbearable.
"I'm in a glorified oven all day, essentially," Reiger said, adding that there's no air conditioning in the warehouse or the trailers that he has to unload. "We have these wall-mounted fans that just kind of blow the hot air from the warehouse into the trailer, it's usually maybe a couple degrees cooler in the warehouse compared to the trailers, but it's really not much different."
Reiger usually works a day shift during the hottest parts of the day. He said the work has taken a toll on his health.
"I mean, I definitely sweat a lot and become very dehydrated throughout the day," he said. "I'll just hop out my trailer, I'll chug a bunch of water real quick and go back in because I'm there to do a job."
As extreme heat events are becoming more frequent, researchers say there's a "hidden crisis" of high temperatures affecting people who work indoors, especially in warehouses and restaurants where employees can easily become overheated with little reprieve.
A new report released this month shows that the impact of heat on indoor workers is widespread.
"The ones that were the most kind of tragic is people saying they go to their cars during their rest break to run the A/C," said Hana Shepherd, report co-author and Rutgers University associate professor of sociology. "Or they go into a freezer that's available to cool off, kind of creating a new risk and hazard."
Symptoms of heat illness and frequency among retail and service sector workers
Employees commonly reported experiencing headaches, fatigue and nausea when temperatures inside regularly reached 80 degrees or higher.
In severe cases of heat illness and injury, workers reported elevated heart rates, confusion, fainting and seizures from the hot conditions.
"We haven't figured out how to really think about it as something that can be and needs to be addressed versus something that is just the new normal," Shepherd said.
She collaborated with researchers at Harvard University and the University of California, San Francisco in surveying more than 3,500 workers at both small and major companies and businesses across the U.S.
People working in warehouses are disproportionately affected by heat exposure — about 44% of respondents said indoor temperatures "often" or "always" exceeded 80 degrees or above. Other people who also said they've experienced hot conditions worked in fast food restaurants, coffee shops and pharmacies.
Some had access to fans, paid breaks or cooled rest areas. But very few people said they had the ability to adjust A/C settings or were allowed to end their shifts early, with or without pay, according to the report.
"The big picture that we got from these responses is that employers just shift the responsibility for cooling off onto the employees," Shepherd said. "And they figure out a way, because people are creative, but that's not necessarily ideal for anyone."
Most surprising, Shepherd said, is the significant portion of people, 40%, working in indoor retail stores selling clothing, beauty products, electronics and household items, "stores where you assume that they're getting properly cooled," who also said they regularly experience 80-degree temperatures on the job.
Barriers to filing complaints and setting a new national heat standard
Shepherd said many workers felt like they couldn't file a complaint or bring their concerns to company owners over hot working conditions out of fear that they'd sour their relationships with direct managers, or be informally punished.
"Like they'd get assigned a worse work shift or a worse job in the kind of job rotation," she said. "You also don't feel like you can say something if you feel like there's no path to changing it."
One of the main problems with addressing indoor workplace heat safety is the lack of a federal standard or labor policy that requires employers and businesses to offer specific workplace accommodations at certain temperatures, Shepherd said.
States like California, Oregon and Minnesota have adopted their own heat-related regulations, but no such policies exist in Delaware, New Jersey or Pennsylvania.
Reiger said he wished his employer would institute additional work breaks, "where on hot days like this, people are allowed to take breaks, you know, cool off, refresh," in addition to having an air-conditioned space to rest.
There is a proposal to set a national heat standard and workplace safety requirements that's currently under review at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, to address some of these issues.
The new rules would require employers to activate certain cooling measures and take other steps to prevent heat hazards in the workplace.
Companies and businesses would need to provide easy access to drinking water and shaded or cooled rest areas when the heat index, which also takes into account humidity, reaches 80 degrees.
When the heat index reaches 90 degrees, employers would need to provide at least one 15-minute paid break every two hours. Prior to anticipated heat waves and extreme heat events, companies would also need to notify workers before the start of their shifts about the dangers and risks of heat and their cooling options while on the clock.
Shepherd said these federal standards and requirements might motivate employers to make more changes or enforce existing policies that were designed to limit heat hazards.
The labor rules might also make workers more comfortable in filing complaints or advocating for changes at their jobs if their employers fail to comply with the rules, she said.
On the other hand, Shepherd said federal agencies like OSHA can be understaffed when it comes to inspection officials and resources, which could affect how well these new heat safety standards are enforced.
"I think the most important thing is figuring out how to make that happen and to preserve it, and to make sure that it actually happens," Shepherd said.
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