Oregon and Minnesota are the only other states that mandate similar protections.
😱 3/50 states require employers to provide water, breaks and cool areas when indoor temperatures hit 28C???
The USA is third world country and first world country at the same time. Just fucking crazy.
The term “third world” is no longer in use. The correct term now is a “developing nation.”
Yes, the US has been considered a developing nation since 2022.
In its global rankings, the United Nations Office of Sustainable Development dropped the U.S. to 41st worldwide, down from its previous ranking of 32nd. Under this methodology – an expansive model of 17 categories, or “goals,” many of them focused on the environment and equity – the U.S. ranks between Cuba and Bulgaria. Both are widely regarded as developing countries.
The U.S. is also now considered a “flawed democracy,” according to The Economist’s democracy index.
To be fair it’s not the sort of thing you think you’d have to make a law about. Should be kind of expected that companies do the bare minimum to keep their staff alive.
If we have learned anything in the last decade, its that you have to put common sense shit into law because if you don’t, shitty corpos will abuse it to make line go up
Safety regulations are written in blood.
My daughter’s daycare had to close yesterday because it was too hot in the building. They have air conditioning but only from window units
OSHA has some protections regarding things like water access and such. But OSHA doesn’t cover every industry.
I worked at a warehouse once with a boiler that worked 40% of the time. We had below 0 degrees F once during a bad storm and we had high 90s in summers. Glad I left before the super El nino heat and glad I don’t have that work environment anymore. To be fair it’s probably also not the worst. Metal smelting plants probably can go 120+ easy.
My wife worked in a factory for a while that was air-conditioned but didn’t have appropriate ventilation to actually circulate the air throughout the plant so it might have simply been better to just open all of the big dock doors and let the crosswind do its thing. It would easily be 90 degrees F inside during the summer. It was nice and comfy in the offices though!
Technically we’ve kind of already had regulations for this in the IWC orders for the manufacturing industry, but all the language was vague. “Industry standards” this and “employers shall make all feasible means” that kinda shit. It’s good to have actual numbers to point at and specific remedies already laid out when you do bring a complaint tho. All this is going to boil down to actually getting enforcement on this shit, and the DOL is already slow as tar
