Restaurant Workers Deserve Safe Working Environments – Yes even during [insert extreme weather condition].
Chicago's summer has been throwing all the weather cards at us this season: dangerous air quality from wildfires, record rain and flooding, and an alarming increase in tornadoes (WTF). And through it all, we continue to clock in.
As Chicago restaurant workers, we’ve seen this before; during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, while other industries were shuttered or transitioned to home offices, restaurants workers were deemed essential and given a choice, come back to work during a global pandemic, or lose their job, most often with no guaranteed health insurance, no PPE, and no increased pay to gamble their health away for.
Climate disasters are being managed by employers exactly as COVID was: externalizing risk onto workers, calling it essential, and offering no compensation for it. It’s deplorable that any employer would ask restaurant workers to staff a patio during unbreathable air or battle high winds and flooding for a paycheck.
So what do you do when your health is on the line because of dangerous air quality or severe weather, and you're still being called in to work or asked to serve on the patio?
We have some (limited) legal protections.
The United States Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is a federal regulatory agency to ensure safe and healthy working conditions. Federal law gives you the right to work in a safe place. Your employer must keep the workplace free from known safety and health hazards. But "responsible for" doesn't mean it guarantees much. OSHA's actual enforceable protections are narrow, and a lot of what gets talked about as a "right" is really just guidance with no teeth behind it.
What OSHA does legally require includes the right to:
Receive safety training in a language you understand
Work on machines that meet safety standards
Receive required safety equipment, like gloves or fall protection
Request an OSHA inspection and speak to the inspector
Report an injury or illness, and access your medical records
Review workplace injury and illness records
Beyond these specific standards, OSHA relies on the General Duty Clause, a catch-all requirement that employers keep the workplace "free from recognized hazards." It's vague enough to be nearly unenforceable in real time. There's no specific standard for wildfire smoke, no federal rule requiring N95s during an air quality alert, no clear threshold that says this is when the patio closes. When a state hasn't passed its own heat, smoke, or extreme-weather protections, workers fall back on the same vague federal clause, written for problems like unguarded machinery, not a climate emergency.
Refusing unsafe work is not the guarantee it sounds like. OSHA gives workers a narrow, conditional right to refuse a task, but only if the danger is imminent and unavoidable, and there's no time to file a complaint first. It is not a blanket right to say "the air quality is bad, I'm going home." That gap is exactly why several states have started passing their own heat-specific standards: because the federal floor isn't holding.
Though the General Duty Clause is vague, the inclusion of non-binding extreme-heat guidelines in safe workplaces acknowledges the core principle we need for our changing weather: climate conditions are a workplace safety issue.
This is a climate justice issue, not just a workplace issue
Climate justice means that the people who did the least to cause this crisis are bearing the greatest risk, with the least power to say no. That's restaurant workers. Disproportionately low-wage, tipped, and immigrant, often without paid sick leave or the standing to simply refuse a shift. When a manager decides the patio stays open through a hazardous air quality alert, it's not the manager breathing that air for eight hours. The people with the least power in the building are the ones absorbing the cost of a crisis they didn't create.
When the law lags behind what workers need to ensure safe, dignified, and equitable work what do you do? You organize.
The law may not be on your side when you want to close the patio because the air quality is hazardous. But an organized workplace, one where back-of-house and front-of-house work together, can win protections the law hasn't caught up to yet. If you want tips on how to start talking with your coworkers and getting organized, send us a DM.
Together demand:
Employer-provided PPE for hazardous air quality — masks, goggles, and other equipment
Hazard pay for working through extreme conditions: heat, poor air quality, severe storms
The same standard OSHA has already set for heat, extended to smoke, flooding, and extreme wind
Laws will not change at the rate of our climate. And until they do, we adapt by organizing, talking to our coworkers, and pushing the industry standard for what actually makes a workplace safe..
We should not have to weigh our survival versus our health.
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