Mildly Infuriating

You're not alone! I worked 12 hours in 37°C (99°F), 47% humidity yesterday. However, we get essentially unlimited breaks in an air conditioned break room, have cooling vests filled with ice packs we can wear on the floor, and are supplied with sports drinks and feeezies. Your work can't really make the world less hot, but they can work with you to avoid development of heat related illnesses!

As someone living in the equator where sun is fucking angry at us everyday, 32°c indoor is toasty, and 34°c indoor is torture. You should report to the authority and let them know.

Unless you work near furnace of course.

I work in environmental, health, and safety, and industrial hygiene, so workplace safety is my jam. You are correct that the regs are shit. Unless you live in one of five states with heat related regulations, you're really only covered by OSHA's general duty clause, which can be summed up as "employers have to at least make a good faith effort to do the bare minimum to not hurt their employees". It sucks.

For workplace temperature, what you'll want to look at is wet-bulb temperature, not the dry-bulb reading provided by a thermostat. You can find online calculators that'll calculate it by temperature and relative humidity. Wet bulb is the measurement accounting for evaporative cooling, so a better approximation of what temperature a human body experiences. Theoretically, a wet-bulb temperature of 35°C (95°F) or more isn't sustainable and will always lead to heat illness with sustained exposure. Around 30°C (about 85°F) is where we start seeing issues if people don't consider any steps to avoid heat illness.

It gets tricky from there as there are a ton of variables to determining a safe temperature, e.g., hydration, environmental radiant heat, cardiovascular health, level of acclimation, nature of the work, body mass, break frequency, access to air conditioned spaces, etc.

For example, at 94°F, a healthy adult performing moderate physical activity out of the sun (or away from any other heat source) should be fine up to about 75% humidity (so a wet bulb of 85°F), assuming they are dressed appropriately, acclimated to the temperature, remain hydrated, take periodic rest breaks in an air conditioned space (I’d advise 10 minutes on the hour, maybe more). I also recommend a monitoring/emergency response program

Let me know if I can help at all. I love heat, but working in it is just miserable.

So, uh... We have the same thermostat at my job. It's not great. You can't just tell it what temperature you want the room to be, you actually have to tell it if you want it to heat or cool to that temperature.

Yours is set set to 65, but if you look to the left of the current temp, it says "heat." Someone likely forgot to change that when the weather warmed up. IIRC, one of the three unlabeled middle buttons will fix that.

Default password on that model is 1234 /salute

Luckily my ambulance has AC. Here's our top temp from yesterday:

collapsed inline media

For me the main thing would be airflow there, and the type of work. I've done full days in 35+ machining but windows and doors were open so there was a breeze which made it bearable (not pleasant days mind you)

The OSHA recommendation is 68-76F, which isn't a direct link to 'reasonable' but provides a suitable context to frame workplace conditions.

If people's body temperatures can be measured exceeding 100F a link to heat stress and increasing risk of injury in the workplace can also be drawn as it's generally the equivalent of working with a fever.

I also work in a factory but our temperature is largely unregulated with the exception of offices, break areas and certain departments where the stock needs to be kept away from too much humidity (so, even in those departments it's humidity control not air conditioning). In the winter it's cold enough that we've had pipes freeze in the center of the building and in the summer it's normal to see 100 degrees at 3am. It's too bad I don't live in one of those states where it's "regulated" because I think anyone would say those temperatures are unreasonable.

Complain that it isn’t reasonable.

I was riding on a bus today where the temperature was 38c(101f). I only sat on it for like 40 minutes and i felt like fucking soup after, imagine having to be the bus driver. High temps like this are extremely dangerous actually.

I vote we rename this comm to "infuriating" and have people bring their own adjectives to their post

Why is it on heat mode? They just dont wanna run AC at all?

We used to have sector wide unions. So even if you were employed by a small business with a few employees, you were still covered by a larger union.

I have family members who really appreciated the neck mounted fans that blow up at back of neck. relatively cheap at like 20-35.

Might be worth getting a giant insulated water bottle to fill with ice, or bringing your own mini fridge and plugging it in somewhere. You could also try getting a Dr note saying you need accommodation - supply of ice water or cooling vests.

It's like that here in Germany too. They have a legal lower temperature limit, but otherwise it's just "if it's hot you have to give your employees water."

It will be 40C next week. No AC in my office.

Pass out from heat exhaustion and then sue them

I don't know what kind of work you do, but I've worked in factories and manufacturing my whole career and this isn't that unusual in my experience. I'd definitely be raising my pitchforks if you weren't provided water, breaks, and some methods of cooling (such as fans).

Worst I've ever had was in a paper mill. The dryers ran very hot and sometimes our job required getting really close to them. They were hot enough to burn, so long sleeves were required when near them. Easily had some 40+ °C days in there, but we had access to a cooled break room and allowed quite a lot of breaks.

Still, when we did have to work by those dryers, it was usually because the paper broke and caused big jams. That is a hell of a mess and has to be cleaned up as quickly as possible to get the machine making paper again. Let me tell you, wet paper is heavy. Hauling that shit down the length of the dryer alley, in 40+ heat, in mandatory sleeves and long pants... Some of the hardest work I've personally ever done.

Pay was great though.

I worked in plastic extrusion for nearly a decade.

The front of the line would be about 85, but the back of the kine, where the work was, hit 110°F to 120F° in the summers.

Absolute hell