Public Employee Press

School kitchens get heat inspections

By JANE LaTOUR

Workers in many school kitchens have been forced to put up with extreme and unsafe temperatures — sometimes topping 120 degrees on hot summer days — but help is on the way.

After a long campaign led by Local 372 President Veronica Montgomery-Costa and the DC 37 Political Action Dept. won corrective legislation last year, the state Labor Dept. began inspections in February. Results will be presented for action to the governor, Assembly speaker and Senate majority leader.

Cooking requires heat, of course, but school kitchens, especially in older buildings, often lack adequate air circulation and cooling ability. The heat builds up and creates stressful and sometimes dangerous working conditions.

Local 372 fights for change
Eight years ago, Board of Education Employees Local 372 began a campaign to remedy these conditions for members by educating lawmakers and pressing for state legislation that would establish air temperature standards and require cooling mechanisms for school cafeteria kitchens.

Pressure for the union proposal mounted, but even when the Legislature passed the bill, Gov. Pataki vetoed it. Last summer, Local 372 members broiled as they toiled. About 75 percent of the kitchens that were open for the summer session had no air conditioning as a heat wave pushed the mercury up. Finally in September, Gov. Spitzer signed the bill into law.

For two weeks in February, each member of the professional staff of DC 37’s Safety and Health Dept. worked with a union rep and two experts from the state Dept. of Labor — an Industrial Hygienist and a Safety Specialist — to inspect selected school kitchens in every borough. “This was truly a team effort,” said DC 37 Safety Director Lee Clarke.

The inspections provided raw data for a report that the Commissioner of Labor must complete by March 1 for the governor and the leaders of both houses of the Legislature in Albany.

Throughout the inspections, the findings were pretty consistent, said Clarke. “The local exhaust hoods in the majority of the schools we visited were not working.Because of this problem, there was no system to pull the heat produced by the ovens, stoves and steamers out of these overheated kitchens.”

Principal Program Coordinator Lisa Baum pointed out that even in some schools that are air-conditioned, the kitchens are not.

“There is absolutely no maintenance of the equipment,” said Clarke. “The kitchens are forgotten areas and the members are forgotten people, except for Local 372 and DC37. More than 1 million kids depend on our members to produce their meals, but the members work under horrendous conditions.”

Local 372 President Veronica Montgomery-Costa expressed her hope that the report will document the inhumane conditions that school kitchen workers are laboring under.

“The legislation opens the door to making badly needed upgrades to our members’ work environments,” she said. “We want the Legislature to find the means within the budget to correct these conditions.”