Picture the same person twice on the same 95-degree July afternoon. First in a Providence commercial kitchen, where the line runs hot past the point any thermostat would admit. Then eight hours later, asleep in a third-floor apartment with one window and no cross-breeze, the room still holding the day’s heat at midnight.
Rhode Island is on the verge of deciding that the first situation is a legal hazard the state can act on. About the second, it has nothing to say at all.
Three bills now parked in committee — H7966 and its Senate companion S2320, along with H8311 — would require employers to protect workers from extreme temperatures. The protections start at an 80-degree heat index — a written prevention plan, water, shade sized to the crew, cool-down breaks, acclimatization for new workers — and escalate from there, until at a 90-degree heat index, which the bills designate “extreme heat conditions,” the employer must add mandatory cooling breaks. The bills are a stated priority of the Rhode Island AFL-CIO, and they are correct on the merits. Above 90 degrees, workplace injuries measurably rise. Heat is not discomfort at that threshold; it is a safety problem, and treating it as one is overdue…