The Impact of Extreme Heat on Food Service Workers

With record-breaking temperatures blanketing the country and no federal heat standard in place, workers find they have no choice but to walk out.

As a heat dome blanketed Portland, Oregon in late June, workers at Voodoo Doughnut’s Old Town location found themselves crumbling in their store. Even with air-conditioning in the shop, ambient thermometers brought in by staff recorded interior temperatures upward of 96 degrees. Workers were breaking out in heat hives and doubling over from nausea. The company’s iconic Bacon Maple Bar doughnuts, with their frosting unable to set due to the heat, literally melted into soggy brown mush.

The high-90 temperatures in the Old Town location were already a drastic surge from the more routine ambient summer heat, which was estimated to be around 80 degrees in the store, even with the fryers running all day. But on June 27, when temperature highs in Portland would eventually reach a record-breaking 112 degrees, it reached more than 100 degrees inside Voodoo Doughnut. Workers went to management and suggested that they close the shop early for their safety. After their demand was waved off, a group of employees walked out and went on strike through Monday, when the city’s temperatures soared even further to 115 degrees.

“We would rather walk out on strike than to see a coworker collapse and hurt themselves or suffer heat stroke or worst case scenario, you collapse while you’re over a fryer,” said Samantha Bryce, a Voodoo Doughnut employee in Portland, who participated in a strike with her colleagues over workplace safety in June. “We don’t want someone to get hurt before the company takes action.”

American workers have long had limited protections against extreme temperatures in the workplace. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the federal agency responsible for ensuring workplace safety, has yet to implement a federal heat standard, instead relying for a half-century on a broad requirement that employers provide a work environment “free from recognized hazards.” But as record-breaking temperatures blanketed the nation this summer, food service workers, many of whom have spent the past year and a half feeding people through a global pandemic, found that their complaints to employers about broken and inefficient cooling systems were going ignored. A number of workers walked off their jobs and tweeted out their workplaces’ injustices, making a point that with heat waves becoming increasingly common, the needle on kitchen thermometers should not shoot up toward all-time highs.