A standards board at the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health voted unanimously to adopt safety measures that require employers to provide cooling areas and monitor workers for signs of heat illness when indoor workplaces temperatures reach or surpass 82 degrees.

If temperatures climb to 87 degrees, or workers are made to work near hot equipment, employers must take additional safety precautions by cooling the work site, allocating more breaks, rotating out workers or making other adjustments.

The new rules still must undergo a procedural legal review. If that review process is expedited the new rules could be in effect by late July or early August. Otherwise, they are likely to be in place by October.

Thursday’s vote marked the end of more than five years of delays in the effort to strengthen the state’s requirements for indoor working conditions. Most recently, a scheduled vote on the rules in March was cancelled after finance officials from Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration raised last-minute concerns about the costs California prisons and other public entities would incur trying to adhere to the new rules.

In light of those concerns, the rules were amended to exclude state and local correctional facilities.

During a public comment period before the board voted, several people urged the board to pass the long-awaited measure.

Tim Shadix, legal director at Warehouse Worker, an advocacy group, said it “would be a tragedy,” if workers become sick from heat exposure this summer and hoped to see the rules in place “well before the end of summer.”

AnaStacia Nicol Wright, a policy manager at Worksafe, voiced concern about the decision to exclude correctional facilities, which employ tens of thousands of people in “archaic buildings with little protection from temperatures.”

Wright pressed the board should move swiftly to put pass separate protections for correctional staff and incarcerated workers.

California, in 2006, became the first state in the nation to implement heat standards for outdoor work, requiring employers to provide access to shade and water, and cool-down rests when workers need them. In high heat conditions, defined as temperatures of 95 degrees or higher, employers are required to remind workers of safe practices, encourage breaks and drinking water, and observe them for signs or symptoms of heat illness.

In 2016, the California Legislature turned its attention to indoor conditions, directing the Cal/OSHA to develop an indoor heat standard by 2019. The agency drafted a proposal mirroring the state regulations that protect outdoor workers, but the rule-making process moved slowly, blowing past the 2019 deadline.

Thursday’s vote came against the backdrop of recent shake-ups on the board that approved the rules.

Earlier this month, the Newsom administration removed worker safety expert Laura Stock and demoted David Thomas from his position as chair of the board after they criticized the 11th-hour decision to delay the vote in March.

Head of the California Labor Federation Lorena Gonzalez criticized the move, saying neither she nor other labor leaders had been consulted in advance.

“Obviously, we are disappointed. We think it’s a big loss for the board,” Gonzalez said. “We hope it’s not retribution for standing up for workers on heat standards.”

In recent years, as the state has experienced record-breaking heat waves, cooks, warehouse workers and delivery drivers have repeatedly raised concerns about high temperatures.

Victor Ramirez, who has worked in various warehouses in the Inland Empire over the past two decades, most recently at a facility in Fontana operated by Menasha Packaging, said many of the warehouses he’s worked in did not have air conditioning or fans. In recent years, fans and air conditioning have become more common, but they “aren’t very effective and those warehouses still feel hot,” he said.

“We need this rule in place right now. Workers need protections, they need training so they know the dangers of the job and working in heat,” Ramirez said. “It’s a basic right to work in a safe environment.”

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The $5.9 million in penalties, which were issued last month, stem from demands that the behemoth e-commerce company placed on thousands of workers at two of its Inland Empire fulfillment centers. The California Labor Commissioner’s Office found that managers at the facilities failed to provide employees with adequate explanations of quotas that they were expected to meet as they prepared orders for shipment.

Mindy Acevedo, staff attorney with the Warehouse Worker Resource Center, an advocacy group, said in a statement released Tuesday that “these citations show Amazon failed to follow fundamental parts of the law.”

The law, AB 701, went into effect at the beginning of 2022 and requires that companies explain in writing the speed at which warehouse workers are expected to complete a certain amount of work as well as the discipline the company may impose for failure to meet the quotas. Under the law, an employee cannot be required to meet a quota that prevents them from taking meal or bathroom breaks and rest periods.

Amazon spokesperson Maureen Lynch Vogel said in an email that the company plans to defend itself against the citations.

“We disagree with the allegations made in the citations and have appealed. The truth is, we don’t have fixed quotas. At Amazon, individual performance is evaluated over a long period of time, in relation to how the entire site’s team is performing,” Vogel said. “Employees can — and are encouraged to — review their performance whenever they wish. They can always talk to a manager if they’re having trouble finding the information.”

The citations include penalties of more than $1.2 million at a warehouse in Redlands and nearly $4.7 million at one in Moreno Valley.

The fines imposed on Amazon are among the first issued by the Labor Commissioner’s Office for failing to provide written quota descriptions to its workers. Since September 2023, the office has handed down $7.8 million in penalties — a total that includes the Amazon fines, according to the Warehouse Worker Resource Center.

The enforcement comes after years of scrutiny over working conditions inside Amazon’s warehouses, including investigations by state and federal agencies into the company’s safety practices. They also come as California has come under fire for failing to enforce labor laws around wage theft and other violations.

Lilia Garcia-Brower, the California Labor Commissioner, said Tuesday at a news conference in Ontario that Amazon had not been singled out for enforcement. Her office, she said, sent out hundreds of letters notifying companies of possible violations and followed up with inspections on companies that failed to respond or comply.

“We are not playing the game of gotcha here,” Garcia-Brower said.

At the news conference, Veronica Kern, who has worked at Amazon for seven years, and currently sorts products and loads them onto conveyor belts at the Moreno Valley warehouse, said it “can be a stressful and intense place,” with managers publicly chastising workers when they decide they aren’t working fast enough.

She described her manager telling her she needed to work faster and that she was performing in the bottom 5% of workers. He would stand outside the bathroom and get workers to hurry back to work, she said.

“They started treating us like a number rather than humans,” Kern said.

Kern recalled how managers would show workers real-time productivity data that they said showed them falling short of production targets, but often would not tell workers what those targets were, she said.

Garcia-Bower said her office will defend the Amazon citation at an appeal hearing. She encouraged workers to reach out to worker centers and other community organizations for help.

“It is so important for workers to come together, understand it is the bad-faith employer who wants you to feel isolated and alone and unfamiliar with your rights.”

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