As climate change drives temperatures up, restaurant staff face uncomfortable, even unsafe, conditions without heat regulations to keep them from harm. Now, some workers are taking matters into their own hands.
This story was produced in collaboration with Civil Eats.
In the middle of the summer in Houston, Texas, the only thing that is more pervasive than the heat is the humidity — and when the air conditioning isn’t working properly, the consequences can be dire. Mad Austin, a former barista at a Houston Starbucks, knows those consequences all too well. “Last summer, my store did not have a properly working AC — it was over 85 degrees in the store on a regular basis,” she says. “Having to go from one end of the store to the other constantly in order to gather customers’ items and bring them up front, you’re basically doing a workout.” And given the external temperature was 110 degrees at the time, going outside offered no relief.
Eventually, it got to be too much. Austin says that workers in the store went back and forth with management on repairs for their air conditioner for weeks, resulting only in temporary fixes that would break down again. Then, they decided to go on strike to demand a permanent solution. Workers picketed outside the Starbucks, holding signs with slogans like “Our work environment is hotter than the coffee!”
Austin says that after the strike, Starbucks management ordered two external air-conditioning units for the building, and after they were installed, the temperature in the store dropped 20 degrees. More than a year later, Austin left her job at Starbucks and is now an organizer with Starbucks Workers United, the labor union that has organized more than 10,000 Starbucks employees. Along with wages and benefits, protections for safe working conditions — including heat mitigation — are one of the union’s asks in the ongoing negotiations with Starbucks.
“It wasn’t just uncomfortable,” Austin says of the heat inside the store; she says she felt concerned for her health and safety. (In a statement, a representative for Starbucks said, “We are committed to ensuring our partners feel safe and supported at work ... Where issues in store jeopardize the well-being of our partners, we have been working with deep care and urgency to take action.”)
Summer heat is, of course, not a new phenomenon, but as climate change takes hold, it is clear that we are in a time of increasingly hot summers. 2023 was the hottest year on record, and with those unprecedented temperatures came more severe weather, including wildfires, floods, and brutal heat waves and drought in places across the globe. Temperatures are only predicted to rise further in the coming years, intensifying those effects and their impact on local infrastructure. When Hurricane Beryl thrashed the city of Houston in early July, millions of people went without power for days, forcing an untold number of business closures — and countless lost wages for employees.
For restaurant workers in particular, the hazards are immediate: Standing over a ripping-hot stove or in front of an oven all day would make anyone sweat, even under the best weather conditions. According to a 2023 survey of restaurant workers conducted by Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, 20 percent of respondents “described experiencing a significant heat-related incident or long-term health impact due to prolonged work in extreme heat,” recalling incidents of fainting, dizziness, and heatstroke. And it’s a legitimate risk: More than 2,300 people in the U.S. died in 2023 as a result of “excessive heat,” according to an Associated Press analysis of CDC data, though that figure is likely underreported.
But there are currently no federal regulations for working conditions in the heat. Only five states — California, Colorado, Minnesota, Oregon, and Washington — have passed laws that provide protections for workers in extreme heat conditions, and those laws mostly apply to outdoor workers. Just this July, Cal/OSHA, California’s worker safety agency, introduced new rules for indoor workplaces, requiring employers to have a plan for mitigating heat when temperatures exceed 82 degrees. Other states, including Texas and Florida, have banned local municipalities from passing their own heat protection regulations, suggesting that local laws were more burdensome to enforce than those at the state level; the Texas ban also invalidated local ordinances that mandated break time for construction workers in the heat.
In July, President Biden proposed federal heat regulations that would apply to all employers under the jurisdiction of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), meaning they would cover both indoor and outdoor workers. Under the regulations, indoor employers like restaurants and commercial kitchens “would be required to identify work areas with the potential for hazardous heat exposure” and enact policies to monitor them. Employers would also be obligated to provide specific worker protections depending on the heat level: At a temperature threshold of 80 degrees, they would be required to provide employees with cold drinking water and cooler break areas; a temperature of 90 degrees and above (considered a “High Heat Trigger”) also requires mandatory rest breaks of 15 minutes every two hours.
ROC United, a nonprofit organization that works to improve the lives of the restaurant workforce, has held heat awareness trainings for restaurant workers in the past. The organization is actively campaigning to get OSHA to certify the federal regulations, urging workers to submit comments to the U.S. Department of Labor. Over the past couple of years, as OSHA has developed this rule, ROC United has submitted more than 1,000 comments from workers in the restaurant industry. “When you think about the restaurant industry, you think about these tight, confined spaces with open flames,” says ROC United deputy director of organizing Jordan Romanus. “But we’ve also been trying to focus on making sure that all restaurant workers are included in this process, both the back-of-the-house and the front-of-the-house. If you’re working on the patio and it’s a hot summer day, that is equally brutal to being in the tight, extremely hot kitchen.”
In recent months, more workers have taken matters into their own hands, fighting for protections from the heat. Workers at Seattle sandwich shop Homegrown signed their first union contract, which ensured time-and-a-half “heat pay” for working on days when temperatures are especially high. (But four months after that contract went into effect, Homegrown announced it would shutter all but two of its locations, citing “economic impacts, including rising labor costs, and food prices” as the reason, impacting more than 150 employees.)
Last summer, Shae Parker was working at a Waffle House in South Carolina where she says the air conditioner was constantly on the fritz. The first few times, the company would call a maintenance technician to make repairs, but Parker describes them as a series of “quick fixes” that didn’t quite solve the problem. Parker was one of many Waffle House workers who picketed outside of the company’s Georgia headquarters in July 2023, demanding protections from the heat as well as other important safety measures. (Waffle House did not respond to a request for comment.)
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Mad Austin
Heat has also galvanized Starbucks workers at locations other than Houston. Last October, a group of Starbucks baristas in Berkeley, California went on strike, citing a broken air-conditioning unit that resulted in some employees experiencing symptoms of heat exhaustion. “Heat is actually a very common issue at Starbucks stores; we’re hearing about issues with air conditioners constantly,” Austin says. “We’re trying to secure a contract that makes sure any issue that impacts the health and safety of workers is taken seriously, and that the company is held accountable. We have to make sure that our concerns and issues can’t just be pushed to the side.”
Regarding the ongoing bargaining, a Starbucks representative said in a statement that “we are proud of our progress to date. The work together continues, and we look forward to continued negotiations.”
What happens at Starbucks could have an impact far beyond its own stores. The coffee behemoth has always been a trendsetter — it’s credited with making benefits like health insurance for part-time employees and tuition reimbursement more common throughout the sector — and its approach to heat protections could inform the entire industry’s approach.
In the interim, workers are fighting for what the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health (COSH) calls “heat justice.” COSH, a federation of 26 grassroots worker groups, is advocating for a slightly more comprehensive national heat standard than proposed by OSHA. The COSH standard would require workplaces to maintain a maximum temperature of 80 degrees, and if that is exceeded, ensure that workers have access to water and breaks in air-conditioned spaces. COSH is also advocating for mandatory training for workers on how to recognize the signs of heat-related illness before they become too severe. “This heat is not just uncomfortable, it’s dangerous,” said Keith Bullard, the deputy director of the Union of Southern Service Workers at a September town hall. “Heat illnesses at work are 100 percent preventable, and what makes it preventable is not rocket science: It’s air conditioning, it’s water, it’s access to cooling breaks.”
Without a mandated standard in place, it’s up to individual restaurant owners to act ethically and protect employees from the heat. The ROC United report explicitly suggests “installing and maintaining HVAC/AC systems in kitchens, ensuring workers are hydrating and taking frequent breaks, and implementing proper ventilation systems around ovens, stovetops, and heat-producing restaurant equipment.”
Energy-efficient HVAC upgrades can have a major impact. “Getting rid of an old, inefficient machine is a no-brainer,” says Michael Oshman, CEO of the nonprofit Green Restaurant Association, which offers sustainability certification to restaurants that meet its environmental standards. “It can be hard to justify financially, but when it’s hot and the [electric] bills are getting higher, it makes more sense to make that investment.” He also encourages restaurants to think creatively, both for their bottom line and the environment. He recommends painting the roof white, which reflects heat away from the building, or putting in a rooftop garden, an upgrade that can both add locally grown produce to the menu and help cool the air well beyond the restaurant itself.
But the costs of these upgrades can be prohibitive in an industry with famously thin margins. In July, Hope and Charles Mathews, the owners of Chleo, a small restaurant in Kingston, New York, closed for an entire week to install an HVAC upgrade to their building, which they own. Their building’s HVAC system piped “makeup air” directly from outside into the kitchen to alleviate the extreme heat of the restaurant’s wood-fired grills, which can burn up to 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. But when the outside temperature is nearly 100 degrees, that approach offers little relief.
Initially, the couple intended to replace the system with one that would push cooled air into the building year-round, but that would’ve cost them more than $60,000, money they didn’t have to spend. They’ve settled, instead, for a pair of “splits,” a cheaper set of units that would pump cooled air only into the restaurant’s warmest spaces, still a major investment in equipment. Also an investment: increased utility bills that come with more air-conditioning. “Utilities are very expensive. Honestly, I don’t even know what these new air-conditioning units are going to cost us, which is totally scary,” Hope says. “When your utility bills are already over $2,000 per month, you don’t want to go much higher than that.”
And sometimes, protecting workers from the heat means telling them not to show up at all. The Mathews’ HVAC upgrades happened only after they made a decision earlier in the summer to shutter their doors for a few days during a heat wave. “We’re a mom-and-pop operation, and we have to make decisions sometimes that aren’t necessarily in our best financial interest, but are in the best interest of the people that work with us,” Hope says.
Yukon Pizza owner Alex White closed his Las Vegas restaurant for much the same reasons. During a July heat wave after its HVAC system gave out, the restaurant’s wood-fired pizza ovens were pumping heat into the space, and it was nearly 100 degrees indoors. “Our number one priority is the health and safety of our customers and our employees,” White says. “There’s no reason or need for any of them to be working in those temperatures.”
OSHA’s proposed rules for a national heat standard are now in the final public comment phase, and both workers and business owners can offer feedback on the proposal through the end of 2024. But even if those rules go into effect — and the outcome of the 2024 election will certainly be the main factor — they will only be useful if restaurant owners and operators follow them. In California, lawmakers have had to find “creative workarounds” for its farmworker heat safety rules to force employers to comply.
“We need permanent solutions, and we need support,” Parker says. “We need everyone to get on board and spread the word. Climate change is a workers’ rights issue, and if we don’t fight for each other, who’s going to do it?”
Workers hope that alerting the public — the customers who enjoy the fruits of their labor — will help their cause. “We got to talk to a lot of our customers and people walking by on the street about what was going on,” Austin says of the Houston Starbucks strike. “People really responded to that. They were going inside telling managers that they stood with the workers, and that they didn’t feel comfortable buying from a store where workers are sweating into their drinks or suffering while making them.”
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