In case you haven’t noticed, it’s hot outside. Inferno hot. Think of what working in a restaurant kitchen must be like, with ovens, stoves and fryers adding to the taste of hell.
Workplace safety regulators are certainly thinking about it. The Biden administration aired a plan earlier this month to protect indoor workers, with such new obligations proposed for employers as providing paid cool-down breaks and setting up a buddy system so workers can monitor one another for signs of heat distress.
Unions are focused on workplace heat dangers as well. Dangerous kitchen temperatures have been increasingly cited as evidence of restaurant employers’ disregard for workers and proof of the need for union representation. The lack of attention to broken or ineffective air conditioners, even in restaurant dining rooms, has been a rallying point, particularly in efforts to draw Waffle House employees to the Union of Southern Service Workers.
Less certain is where blistering heat falls on restaurant employers’ list of concerns, which is likely headed by “Pulling in enough sales to make payroll.” The last thing operators need is another four-alarm issue on their plates. Yet the matter has to be addressed because the danger to employees is real. Even in cooler times, an average of 40 American workers die per year from intolerable workplace temperatures, according to federal statistics, and nearly another 34,000 are sufficiently incapacitated to miss work.
With temperature records being broken year after year, the risk is only going to escalate.
If the industry doesn’t jump out ahead of the issue and allay the danger voluntarily, it’ll only deepen the black eye it still bears from the pandemic, when it hit a new low in its handling of staffs. First it fired them all. Then it called workers back because they were adjudged to be essential workers. Never mind that they were exposed to a potentially lethal disease, or that they were the agents who enforced government mask requirements.
That bash to the industry’s image, which wasn’t exactly golden already, is still hampering the trade’s effort to draw and keep employees. If it shrugs off the efforts to protect employees from excessive heat, a particular danger for the business, it’ll only confirm the perceptions that have driven away potential hires.
It needs to lead on the matter, and not be dragged into providing protections because the government will punish it otherwise. And that means doing more than allowing chefs or cooks to indulge in a cold beer while they work.
OSHA’s safety measures likely won’t be finalized and put into practice before the summer ends, giving the business a window in which to act before furnace-level temperatures return.
If the trade was smart, it’d have at least the most practical of the workplace watchdog’s recommendations in place voluntarily by the time the actions are mandated. Why not, if it’ll only have to undertake those actions eventually?
As hot as it is, maybe the heat needs to be turned up a little on taking action, though voluntarily at this point.