Indoor heat exposure is a rising problem for service sector workers, according to a report authored by Hana Shepherd, an associate professor of sociology at Rutgers University-New Brunswick and a senior researcher with the Workplace Justice Lab@RU.
The report, released by the Shift Project — a joint initiative of Harvard Kennedy School’s Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy and the University of California, San Francisco — was co-authored by Kristen Harknett, a professor of sociology at the University of California, San Francisco; and Henri Jackson, a pre-doctoral fellow at the Shift Project.
Based on data from 3,514 service sector employees throughout the United States, researchers found widespread reports of indoor workers feeling overheated and regularly experiencing temperatures exceeding 80 degrees Fahrenheit, often with little recourse. “We expected to find some indoor heat exposure among retail workers, but not nearly the levels we did find,” Shepherd said. “These numbers suggest that millions of service sector workers across the country are regularly exposed to potentially unsafe levels of heat indoors each summer and they have very limited ability to mitigate their heat exposure. This creates various health risks for them.” To read the full story.