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.

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!

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.

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

They didn’t even set the fan to “on” mode!

literally in the danger zone unless it’s super dry where you are.