News
New rules will protect California workers from dangerous heat indoors
Warehouses in California can get dangerously hot. The state just passed a rule protecting people who work indoors in industries like warehousing, restaurants or manufacturing from excessive heat.
Virginie Goubier/AFP via Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
Virginie Goubier/AFP via Getty Images
California’s Occupational Health and Safety (Cal/OSHA) Standards Board voted Thursday afternoon to implement rules protecting indoor workers from extreme heat.
California now joins just a few other states, including Oregon and Minnesota, to protect people who work indoors in facilities like warehouses, restaurants and refineries. The state estimates the new rule will apply to about 1.4 million people who work indoors in conditions that can easily become dangerously hot.
“It’s an urgent public health crisis, the impact of heat on health, as we’re seeing across the country,” says Laura Stock, a former Cal/OSHA Standards Board member and the director of the Labor Occupational Health Program at the University of California, Berkeley. “There was an urgent need for this regulation. It’s in line with what we already have in California, which is the recognition that heat is a life-threatening exposure hazard.”
Now, when indoor temperatures hit 82 degrees Fahrenheit, employers will be required to provide employees with cool places to take breaks. Above 87 degrees, they’ll need to change how people work. That could mean shifting work activities to cooler times of the day, for example, or cooling down workspaces using tools like fans or air conditioning.
The rule could be implemented by early August, says Eric Berg, Cal/OSHA’s deputy chief of health and research and standards.
That can’t come quickly enough for workers facing dangerously hot weather already, says Tim Shadix, legal director of the Warehouse Worker Resource Center, a worker advocacy group based in Southern California.
“In the worst places we’ve seen, you know, in the summer, those workplaces, they’re kind of like a tin can baking in the sun,” Shadix says. “We hope there are no further delays and employees and employers are informed of these new protections before summer’s end.”
Early June saw record-breaking temperatures across the state, well above 100 degrees in some inland regions home to thousands of warehouses. Scientists from the World Weather Attribution group recently determined that June’s heat wave was longer, hotter and 35 times more likely to occur than in a world without human-caused climate change.
Sarah Fee used to work in warehouses in the Inland Empire, in Southern California. Outdoor temperatures regularly hover in the 90s or above during the summer, and many warehouses are as hot, or sometimes hotter, than the outdoors.
“I would leave work, my shirt would be soaked in sweat, and I would be absolutely nauseous,” she says. “Fans weren’t enough.”
A spotty patchwork of heat rules nationwide
There are no national rules protecting workers, outdoors or indoors, from dangerous heat. Employers are required to provide workplaces “free from recognized hazards” under the federal Occupational Health and Safety Administration’s General Duty clause, including heat, but worker advocates point out that the guidelines on heat-specific risk are challenging to enforce and have been used infrequently.
In the absence of robust federal guidance, individual cities like Phoenix, Ariz., and five states, including Oregon, Washington and Minnesota, have created their own regulations that give outdoor workers, like farmworkers or construction workers, rights to water breaks and access to shade when temperatures soar.
But others have explicitly blocked such rules. Earlier this year, Miami-Dade County in Florida was on the cusp of proposing a local rule to address heat risk for outdoor laborers. But Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a state law banning cities or counties from making their own heat rules.
OSHA has been developing a national-scale heat rule that would protect both indoor and outdoor workers, but the process could take years. A draft was recently sent to the White House for review.
California’s adoption of the indoor heat rule is “a really an important step, and a signal to other states and employers that this is really something to pay attention to,” says Jill Rosenthal, the director of public health policy at the Center for American Progress. “We hope to see that more states will take up these kinds of policies and again, for health reasons and also for economic reasons.”
In the meantime, workers in California and beyond are being hurt, and sometimes dying, from heat exposure.
A long road to indoor heat protection
In 2016, California lawmakers approved a bill tasking Cal/OSHA with creating a rule to protect people who worked indoors from heat exposure — a companion to the state’s 2005 law protecting outdoor workers. The state was supposed to create the rule by 2019, but conflict over its scope slowed the rule’s progress for years. The debates were over which industries the protections would cover, what actions would need to be taken after certain temperatures were reached and what businesses would be required to actively cool workplaces that were too hot.
The text for the rule was finalized earlier this year. The standards board was set to vote on it in March 2024, but the night before the vote, the board was informed that California’s Department of Finance had raised concerns about the cost to the state for complying with the rule — particularly about the effort required to get the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) into compliance. The department operates more than 30 adult state-owned facilities across the state, most of which are cooled by fans or evaporative coolers, not air conditioning.
At the March meeting, board members expressed their frustration with the last-minute delay and took a symbolic vote to approve the rule anyway.
The new version of the rule that passed Thursday now excludes CDCR. The Standards Board says it will work on developing a separate pathway to address those workers’ safety. But AnaStacia Nicol Wright, with the worker rights organization WorkSafe, worries the process could drag out, putting thousands of employees — and prisoners — at risk for another summer, or more. “Incarcerated workers are also employees under California labor code,” she said at the meeting. “These workers are at risk of heat exhaustion and dehydration, due to working in often archaic, poorly ventilated buildings with little protection from temperatures.”
Some employer groups still object to components of the rule. Rob Moutrie, from the California Chamber of Commerce, noted that many small businesses that rent their facilities don’t control their own infrastructure, making it difficult or impossible to provide the cool-down spaces the new rule requires.
Bryan Little, director of labor affairs with the California Farm Bureau, pointed out that groups like his had similar concerns to Corrections about the potentially prohibitive costs of installing and using “engineering controls,” like air conditioning, to cool workplaces. “As an employer advocate, I wonder what it takes to get heard,” he said in the meeting.
The rule could be in place by late summer. The sooner, the better, says Stock.
“I think the urgency of this is really evident,” she says. “The impact of climate change on temperature is just exacerbating the exposure, and temperatures are higher for more months.”
When Stuart Sepulvida arrives at St. Francis de Sales Roman Catholic Parish in Tucson, Ariz., for Mass, which he attends most mornings, he passes a display honoring local soldiers and encouraging parishioners to pray for their safety. Hundreds of small cards record their names: Robles, Arenas, Grajeda. A portrait of Pope Leo XIV hangs across the lobby.
Mr. Sepulvida, 81, is a Vietnam veteran whose patriotism and Catholicism are deeply intertwined. He voted for President Trump three times but has never felt more betrayed by an American president than when Mr. Trump denounced Pope Leo as “weak on crime” and “terrible for foreign policy.”
“It was very disturbing to me to hear both of them clashing like they did,” Mr. Sepulvida said, standing outside the church one morning this week. Now, he is reconsidering whether he will vote Republican this year.
The Republican Party is struggling to hold onto the support from Hispanic voters who helped propel Mr. Trump back into the White House in 2024. Yet as many party leaders have acknowledged the urgent need to stop the backsliding among Latinos, the president has enraged many of even his strongest supporters by clashing with the pope.
On Easter Sunday, Pope Leo, the first U.S.-born pontiff, spoke of the need to “abandon every desire for conflict, domination and power, and implore the Lord to grant his peace to a world ravaged by wars.” Within days, Mr. Trump, who has led the United States into a war with Iran, said the pope was “catering to the radical left” and posted an AI-generated image portraying himself as a Jesus figure. Mr. Trump later deleted the image, saying he thought it depicted him as a doctor.
“It just isn’t what a president should do,” Mr. Sepulvida said. “The pope speaks for his people. He is beyond politics.”
Mr. Trump won 55 percent of Catholic voters in the 2024 election, compared to 43 percent who voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris, according to Pew Research Center. The most sizable gains came from Hispanic Catholics. While Joseph R. Biden Jr. won their votes by a 35-point margin in 2020, the Democratic advantage shrunk to 17 points in 2024. Now, just 18 percent of Hispanic Catholics said they support most or all of President Trump’s agenda, according to a poll from Pew released earlier this year.
If the president’s quarrel with the pope sours more Latinos on the Republican Party, it could affect midterm races across the country, including in South Florida and South Texas, where Republicans have notched important victories in predominantly Hispanic districts in recent years.
In Arizona’s Sixth Congressional District, which stretches from north of Tucson to the Mexican border, voters were still grappling with the fallout this week.
The district is roughly evenly divided among Republicans, Democrats and independent voters. Nearly a third of the district is Hispanic, and there is a significant population of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as well as a large Catholic community with deep history in the region. It also has one of largest numbers of military veterans of all congressional districts in the country.
“The president is looking for a lot of attention from everything,” said Maria Ramos, 60, who regularly attends weekday Mass at St. Francis. A registered independent, she usually votes for Democrats but often declines to cast a ballot if she views a candidate as too liberal. “He believes he can put God in his place. He’s meddling in countries that he’s not in control of — he wants to control the world.”
“It is not just a very serious lack of respect — it is a mortal sin,” she said, shaking her head. One word comes to her mind again and again, she said: disgust.
Like so many others in southern Arizona, Ms. Ramos has several relatives who serve in the military — a path they saw to both serve the country and as an entry into the stable middle class. Many of them, she said, voted for Mr. Trump for president.
The Tucson district is now widely seen as one of the most competitive in the country. Republican Juan Ciscomani narrowly won the district in 2022, in part by emphasizing his biography as a Mexican immigrant and a devoted father of six children. He is also an evangelical Christian, a group that has driven much of the growth among Hispanic Republican voters in recent years.
Mr. Ciscomani declined a request for an interview, but when a local radio host asked Mr. Ciscomani what he thought of Mr. Trump’s comments “as a man of faith,” the congressman declined to criticize the president but said, “You can trust that you won’t see any meme like that coming out of my account.”
JoAnna Mendoza, the Democrat challenging Mr. Ciscomani this fall, has made her 20-year career in the U.S. Navy and Marines a key aspect of her story on the campaign trail. While she rarely speaks about her religious background and no longer considers herself a practicing Catholic, she said she briefly considered becoming a nun as a teenager. She criticized Mr. Ciscomani for not condemning the president’s remarks.
“You can’t make faith a central part of your campaign and then allow this to stand,” she said in an interview.
Across Tucson, Latino Catholics, regardless of their past voting preferences, were similarly quick to condemn the president’s remarks.
When Cecilia Taisipic, 71, heard about it, she said, she winced with shame about her vote for him in 2024.
“I thought he would make the country better, but apparently it’s the opposite,” she said as she left Mass at St. Francis earlier this week. She is so fed up with politics, she said, that she is unlikely to vote at all this year. “When it comes to my faith, I don’t like anybody to challenge it. Now I don’t want to hear anything on the news. I just want to pray.”
Matilde Robinson Bours, 63, teaches a weekly Spanish Bible study class at St. Thomas the Apostle Parish, and like nearly all of the women in her class, she immigrated from Mexico decades ago. She has voted for Republicans in nearly every election since she became a citizen. Though she has never liked President Trump, she said, his comments about the pope enraged her more than anything else he has said or done in the past.
“This surpassed everything, every social and political norm — this is personal to all Catholics,” she said. “The arrogance and ego is disgusting. To think that he is God? The pope has every right and responsibility to talk about peace.”
Still, Ms. Robinson Bours said, nothing will stop her from supporting Republicans again this year. She has been delighted that her adult children have stopped supporting Democrats in recent elections.
“Almost everyone I know thinks the way I do,” she said.
Patricia Martinez, 86, who has attended the same Bible study as Ms. Robinson Bours for years, shook her head in disagreement. She said she cannot imagine voting for a Republican who supports Mr. Trump.
“This is different — this shows he is out of his mind,” said Ms. Martinez. “We have to have basic respect and teach that to people in this country.”
Patrick Robles, a 24-year-old native of Tucson, spent years alienated from the Roman Catholic Church, but returned to his faith more recently. “The craziness of the world sort of caused me to seek some sort of answers,” he said. Now, he attends Mass at the St. Augustine Cathedral in downtown Tucson, a few blocks from the office where he works as an aide to Representative Adelita Grijalva, a Democrat.
Mr. Robles said he saw Mr. Trump’s battle with the pope as both a personal affront and a political opportunity.
“The president is basically trying to draw a line between Catholics and what we perceive to be patriotism,” he said. “I believe we can be both.”
Last week, he texted one of his uncles who has supported Mr. Trump in every election asking him what he thought.
“I’m afraid we need divine intervention,” the uncle replied.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., takes questions at a news conference at the Capitol on Tuesday.
J. Scott Applewhite/AP
hide caption
toggle caption
J. Scott Applewhite/AP
Speaker Mike Johnson, R.-La., is forging ahead with his latest proposal to renew a key American spy power. His bill, revealed Thursday, is largely unchanged from a previous plan which failed in a series of overnight votes earlier this month.
The program at center of the debate, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), is set to expire on April 30.
FISA 702 allows U.S. intelligence agencies to intercept the electronic communications of foreign nationals located outside of the United States. Some of the nearly 350,000 foreign targets whose communications are collected under the provision are in touch with Americans, whose calls, texts and emails could end up in the trove of information available to the federal government for review.
For almost two decades, privacy-minded lawmakers from both parties have sought to require specific court approval before federal law enforcement can conduct a targeted review of an American’s information gathered through the program. The lack of any such warrant requirement helped sink an effort last week to extend the program for 18 months, as well as a separate vote on a five-year renewal.
Trump officials, like those in past administrations, have argued that such a warrant requirement would overburden law enforcement and endanger national security. Johnson’s latest proposal would reauthorize the program for three years, but does not include a warrant requirement. Instead, the bill calls for the FBI to submit monthly explanations for reviews of Americans’ information to an oversight official as well as criminal penalties for willful abuse, among other tweaks.
“I am willing to risk the giving up of my Rights and Privileges as a Citizen for our Great Military and Country,” the president wrote on Truth Social last week, advocating for the program to be extended without changes. “I have spoken with many in our Military who say FISA is necessary in order to protect our Troops overseas, as well as our people here at home, from the threat of Foreign Terror Attacks. It has already prevented MANY such Attacks, and it is very important that it remain in full force and effect.”
Glenn Gerstell, who served as general counsel at the National Security Agency during the Obama and first Trump administration, says Johnson’s reforms look like an attempt to find a middle ground.
“There’s not a lot of really substantive changes to the statute, but some gestures are made to people who are worried about privacy and civil liberties,” Gerstell said. “It seems like a pretty reasonable compromise that is going to be satisfactory to the national security agencies and yet at the same time represents some gesture to the privacy advocates.”
“This is not a reform bill and it’s not a compromise,” Elizabeth Goitein, a privacy advocate and senior director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, wrote on X. “It’s a straight reauthorization with eight pages of words that serve no serious purpose other than to try to convince members that it’s NOT a straight reauthorization.”
A bipartisan reform deal is still out of reach
Connecticut Rep. Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence committee, told NPR on Wednesday, before the release of Johnson’s new proposal, that lawmakers were working on a bipartisan solution. He said House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., was in touch with Johnson on the issue.
“There’s a lot of work being done here,” Himes said. “We’re sort of working out a process that will be inclusive rather than exclusive.” Himes said he was negotiating with Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat and constitutional law scholar, on a reform proposal they hoped could preserve and reform the program — reauthorizing it with bipartisan support.
But Johnson’s new bill appears to fall short of the inclusive approach Himes hoped for.
NPR obtained a memo written by Raskin to his colleagues urging them to oppose the bill, which he said “continues the disastrous policy of trusting the FBI to self-police and self-report its abuses of Section 702 and backdoor searches of Americans’ data.”
“FBI agents can still collect, search, and review Americans’ communications without any review from a judge,” Raskin wrote.
FBI agents must receive annual training on FISA and are generally barred from searching for information about people in the U.S. if the goal of the search is to investigate general criminal activity, rather than find foreign intelligence information, and those searches need approval from a supervisor or an attorney.
Republican hardliners — who sunk Johnson’s last reauthorization attempt — also don’t all appear to be on board for Johnson’s latest revision. Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, a past chair of the Freedom Caucus, said “we’re not there yet” in a video he shared to X on Thursday.
“I didn’t take an oath to defend FISA, I didn’t take an oath to defend the intelligence community,” Perry said. “We can’t have them spying on American citizens and, when they do, there has to be accountability and I haven’t seen any that I’m satisfied with yet.”
The House Rules committee meets Monday morning, the first step toward advancing the renewal bill toward a vote.
President Trump announced a three-week extension of a cease-fire between Israel and Lebanon that had been set to expire in a few days, after hosting a meeting between Israeli and Lebanese diplomats at the White House on Thursday.
Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant group that has been attacking Israel from southern Lebanon, did not have representatives at the meeting and did not immediately comment on the announcement. The prime minister of Israel and the president of Lebanon also did not comment.
A successful peace agreement would hinge upon Hezbollah halting attacks, which Lebanon’s government has little power to enforce because it does not control the militia. Lebanon’s military has mostly stayed out of the fighting and is not at war with Israel.
The cease-fire, which was scheduled to end on April 26, would last until May 17 if it takes effect as Mr. Trump described it. Before the cease-fire was brokered last week, nearly 2,300 people were killed in Lebanon and 13 in Israel. Since then, the number of Israeli airstrikes and Hezbollah attacks have been dramatically reduced, though the two sides have continued exchanging fire.
The Lebanese Ambassador to the United States, Nada Hamadeh, credited Mr. Trump for extending the cease-fire, saying that “with your help and support, we can make Lebanon great again.” Mr. Trump replied, “I like that phrase, it’s a good phrase.”
Asked about the potential of a lasting peace agreement between Israel and Lebanon, Mr. Trump said that “I think there’s a great chance. They are friends about the same things and they are enemies on the same things.”
But Lebanon and Israel have periodically been at war since Israel’s founding in 1948. Israel has invaded Lebanon for the fifth time since 1978, incursions that have destabilized the country and the delicate balance of power between Muslim, Christian and Druze communities.
In the hours before the president’s announcement on social media, Israel and Hezbollah were trading attacks in southern Lebanon, testing the existing cease-fire.
Mr. Trump said the meeting at the White House had been attended by high-ranking U.S. officials, including Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the U.S. ambassadors to Israel and Lebanon.
Earlier on Thursday, an Israeli strike near the southern Lebanese city of Nabatieh killed three people, according to Lebanon’s health ministry. Hezbollah claimed three separate attacks on Israeli troops who are occupying southern Lebanon, though none were wounded or killed.
Hezbollah set off the latest round of fighting last month by attacking Israel soon after the start of the U.S.-Israeli bombing campaign in Iran. Israel responded to Hezbollah’s attacks by launching airstrikes across Lebanon and widening a ground invasion of the country’s south.
-
Massachusetts5 minutes agoNew Mass. rideshare safety rules would boost driver background checks and more
-
Minnesota11 minutes agoLocked capitol doors, more security funds are new normal after Minnesota assassination
-
Mississippi17 minutes agoMississippi powered Artemis II
-
Missouri23 minutes agoKansas City, Missouri, police launch homicide investigation, after shooting at 55th and Prospect
-
Montana29 minutes agoEmergency declared as supply chain disruptions hit farms
-
Nebraska35 minutes agoToday in History – April 24: Statue added to top of Nebraska Capitol
-
Nevada41 minutes agoHenderson mental health professionals to be dispatched through 988
-
New Hampshire47 minutes agoNH News Recap: Local police and ICE funds; more YDC scrutiny; good news in Franklin