Heat kills. So do Republicans who oppose government protections against excessive heat in the workplace.
“Extreme heat — this is a — I think going to surprise a lot of people — not you all — but extreme heat is the number one weather-related killer in the United States. More people die from extreme heat than floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes combined. Say that again: combined. More people die from heat than those three other major issues.”—President Joe Biden, July 2, 2024
“More than a century of burning coal, oil, and natural gas has given us an increasingly dangerous world. The heat waves popping up around the world this summer are unnatural disasters that will become more and more common until carbon pollution stops.”—Andrew Pershing, vice president for science at Climate Central
Back in 1972, just over a year after the Occupational Safety and Health Administration was created, the agency published Occupational Exposure to Heat and Hot Environments with recommendations for addressing excessive heat perils in the workplace. Over the years, it also developed guidelines for how employers should protect workers from heat-related conditions. The trouble with voluntary guidelines is that they’re voluntary, and a large portion of employers simply ignore them. The consequences are reserved for workers who are injured or killed by excessive heat.
Despite that early start more than half a century ago, it wasn’t until 2021 that the Biden administration ordered OSHA to get to work coming up with a rule mandating heat protections on the job, indoors and outdoors. A proposed rule the administration says will protect 36 million workers was announced Tuesday, and it’s now open for public comment.
Currently, only five states—California, Colorado, Minnesota, Oregon, and Washington—have established their own workplace heat standards. Two states—Florida and Texas—have not only set no standards, they’ve barred cities and counties in their states from enacting any. They just don’t care if workers are injured or die on the job.
In 1972 OSHA made recommendations for a heat standard in the workplace. Last week, the Biden administration announced one.
At the announcement, Assistant Secretary for Occupational Safety and Health Douglas L. Parker said: “Workers all over the country are passing out, suffering heat stroke and dying from heat exposure from just doing their jobs, and something must be done to protect them. Today’s proposal is an important next step in the process to receive public input to craft a ‘win-win’ final rule that protects workers while being practical and workable for employers.”
The proposed rule would apply to indoor and outdoor workers engaged in physical activity who are exposed to a heat index of 80°F or higher. It would require employers to develop annually reviewed plans for preventing injuries, illnesses, and death from heat hazards in the workplace. These plans must include employer scrutiny of excessive heat risks, provision of drinking water, institution of rest breaks, and restrictions on indoor heat. For certain jobs, employers would be required to designate a heat safety coordinator and procedures for dealing with heat-related symptoms. Also required are employer plans for orienting and protecting new employees not yet acclimated to working in high heat. OSHA reports that 50% to 70% of heat-related fatalities occur during the first week of work.
In the past it’s taken OSHA around seven years to go from a proposal to a finalized rule. So the speed with which the heat rule has moved through the process might, by comparison, be viewed as a whoosh. Just getting all the interagency vetting of a newly proposed rule is supposed to be done within three months, but this time it took just three weeks. At the paywalled E&E News, David Michaels, who led OSHA during the Obama administration, said: “That’s record time. I’ve never seen a major proposed rule go through the White House so quickly. It shows that if the president is committed to protecting workers, this process can move very quickly.”
Even under the best circumstances, however, with the rule being finalized in November after public comments are reviewed, it won’t take effect until 2026.
And if Donald Trump manages to squirm his way back into the Oval Office, it may not take effect at all. Indeed, it’s no stretch to imagine Trump at the podium making 3rd-grader-style fun of a worker dying from heat on the job. He, and the partisans of the Project 2025 manifesto, including those on the Supreme Court, are hellbent on wrecking environmental, health, and safety regulations as part of their crusade to disassemble or cripple regulatory measures in favor of boosting bottom lines.
Experts’ predictions about the future of the rule reflect the recent politicization of extreme heat. Earlier this year, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis enacted anti-immigrant legislation that included a law that bans municipalities from requiring employers to enact protections, such as shade or water breaks, for outdoor workers. The bill closely resembled a Texas law barring localities from creating such regulations, which passed last summer.
A bevy of the latest Supreme Court rulings have sabotaged both environmental regulatory implementation and enforcement, and there reportedly are more such cases headed to the court. As for the heat rule, lawsuits are inevitable. Trade groups and other lobbyists have opposed mandated heat rules for decades. OSHA itself has been repeatedly attacked from the right, and is grossly underfunded. Of the 7 million U.S. workplaces under its jurisdiction, OSHA inspected 31,820 in 2022. At that rate, it would take 219 years to inspect all workplaces.
“The likelihood is if Trump is elected, the rule will be put on the shelf for his four years,” said Juley Fulcher of Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy group that has long been active in seeking a heat rule. It first petitioned OSHA for a mandatory heat standard to protect workers in 2011. Fulcher noted in a statement:
“President Biden’s decision to protect workers with a comprehensive federal workplace heat standard is a monumental victory for those who toil in the summer heat. If enacted, the simple measures to protect workers—water breaks, a cool spot to recover, and rest—will provide key protection from illness, injury and death.
“Several states have put workplace heat protections in place and elected officials in Florida and Texas have taken action to strip workers of heat-related protections. The punitive cruelty of denying workers access to water and protection from heat by elected officials has been monstrous. White House approval of the OSHA proposed rule demonstrates the commitment of President Biden and the Department of Labor to protecting workers from deadly heat hazards. A nationwide protection standard is essential to ensure workers are protected and provided with the necessary and humane protections to work safely in the summer heat.
An E&E News review of federal data shows that, just since the Biden administration initiated work on the heat standard, there have been 83 heat-related workplace deaths. This, said an OSHA spokesperson, is “almost certainly an undercount.” According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, between 2011 and 2020, there were 33,890 work-related heat injuries and illnesses between 2011 and 2020, with 436 deaths, a tally that is also widely viewed as a serious undercount.
As for the Supreme Court’s reversal of the Chevron deference last month, Jordan Barab, OSHA’s deputy assistant secretary of Labor for occupational safety and health during the Obama administration, noted that the decision means that federal judges could intervene and assert that they know better than any experts at OSHA to determine whether heat is dangerous enough to necessitate protections.
“Instead of the health experts at OSHA, it’s going to be totally up to a judge to decide if starting requirements at 80 degrees is reasonable, or if that trigger point should be 90 or 97 degrees,” Barab said. “They could even say, ‘Hey, people in Texas know how to handle heat, they don’t need this training’.”
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