Employers' responsibilities
If an employee works outside for most or some of the working day, their employer is legally obliged to provide protection from the sun and heat, especially during the hotter months.
An employer must protect workers from UV radiation exposure that:
- may cause adverse health effects, or
- may exceed the Exposure Limits in Schedule 1 of the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Regulation 1999 (non-Queensland Government link) .
Workers also have a legal obligation to comply with instructions regarding sun safety precautions, to use personal protective equipment and to ensure that they do not put themselves or another person at risk.
There is no single factor such as a ‘maximum allowable temperature’ which should be applied in a workplace as a ‘cease work’ limit. Many variables should be considered when determining whether heat stress experienced in a workplace will result in heat-related illness for workers. Some of these workplace factors are listed below:
- air temperature
- relative humidity
- air movement
- radiant heat
- type of clothing worn
- activity and work rate of the worker
- worker acclimatisation state
- state of health of the worker and
- protective clothing requirements.
It is quite possible, then, that a worker in ‘light clothing’ working in a high air temperature environment but at low humidity, with minor radiant heat sources and reasonable air movement, will suffer less from heat stress than if working in ‘heavier clothing’ elsewhere in a lower air temperature workplace but at higher humidity and, perhaps, with less air movement, higher radiant heat levels etc.
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