‘You Get Cooked Like a Microwave’: OSHA Considers Heat-Safety Rules—But Trump Team Is Opposed
Light-colored concrete, like the kind being used on this Miami building, reflects heat greatly. Photos/Freddy Pierre/Beyond the Bars
By Steve Wishnia
“I’m somewhat surprised to see this hearing kept on the schedule,” Marc Freedman of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce told an Occupational Safety and Health Administration panel June 16, the first day of two weeks of hearings on federal heat-safety rules proposed by the Biden administration last year. President Donald Trump suspended consideration of all pending regulations in an executive order Jan. 20.
The proposed rule would require employers to give workers water, shade, and 15-minute rest breaks every two hours when the heat index exceeds 90°. The Department of Labor estimated last year that it would protect 36 million workers. It said that on average, 40 workers die annually from exposure to environmental heat, and almost 3,000 are affected badly enough to miss days of work—and that these statistics “are likely vast underestimates.” In 2023, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported 14 heat-injury deaths in Texas alone.
A federal heat standard is “critically overdue,” AFL-CIO safety and health director Rebecca Reindel told the panel, as climate change is making heat worse. The National Institute on Occupational Safety and Health first recommended it in 1972, she noted.
But the first administration witness, Chip W. Bishop III of the Small Business Administration, said OSHA should “withdraw the proposed rule.” He called the rest-break requirement “onerous” and “inflexible,” and said OSHA should replace the proposal with “performance-oriented” standards, such as applying the regulations only to employers that have a high injury rate, or limiting the mandate to training employers about heat safety.
The rest-break debate
More than 69 million workers in the U.S. face a risk of heat-related illness every summer, according to the National Committee on Occupational Safety and Health (COSH), yet there are no federal standards to protect them. Only four states—California, Oregon, Nevada, and Maryland—have regulations protecting both outdoor and indoor workers. Three others protect narrower groups of workers, and about 10 have pending legislation.
The jobs with the highest risks include construction, poultry processing, and temporary and restaurant work, COSH Southern regional coordinator Brittney Jenkins told Work-Bites.
“People are nauseous. They can’t keep food down. Employers aren’t doing anything,” says Jazmin Moreno-Dominguez, organizing manager at Agave Community Threads in Phoenix, speaking to Work-Bites on a 112°-degree afternoon. “If you’re outside, it burns your skin, it burns your scalp. Every single summer, it gets hotter.”
The long-term consequences she’s seen in her father’s construction coworkers include kidney failure. One man had to quit because he had permanent heart damage, she said. He was 25.
Body heat can leap to deadly levels within 10 to 15 minutes, Dr. Darius Sivin of the United Auto Workers’ health and safety department told the hearing.
Employer advocates, however, denounced the rule as a “one-size-fits-all” mandate that would be too harsh on businesses, especially small ones. The Chamber of Commerce’s Freedman and Elizabeth Milito of National Federation of Independent Businesses both said that the 90° threshold ignores differences in local climates, from the dry heat of Arizona to humid New Orleans to the cooler Northeast.
Freedman said the rules would require rest breaks for workers “regardless of whether they are suffering symptoms.” Both he and Milito said they would disrupt workflow: Concrete could set while workers were on a break, and planes could be delayed if baggage handlers stopped to rest.
Jenkins’ response to that argument was that work would also be delayed “if someone’s passing out, and you need to deal with an ambulance.”
Freedman said the government should let employers “figure out what makes sense.” Asked what situations should trigger a rest break, he said he was “not going to put out a specific schedule.”
The Miami skyline bakes under the harsh summer sun—but the work continues—as it does across the country.
Milito said that OSHA’s current advice documents were sufficient for employers to develop their own heat-safety procedures. Asked by Jordan Barab, an OSHA official in the Obama administration, if all employers were following that guidance, she answered no, but added that there was no need to pile on more federal regulations.
Anthony Abron of the National Safety Council told the panel that with heat hazards becoming more prevalent, enacting federal standards was “both a moral and an economic imperative.” He said that prescriptive rules were easier to follow, and that helping employers comply with them would work best.
Temps, mail carriers excluded
The current proposed rule would not cover sedentary indoor workers and postal workers, AFL-CIO health specialist Chenay Arberry noted. Two mail carriers have died from extreme heat exposure in the past two years. The death of another, in Colorado May 30, has been attributed to chronic disease, but he collapsed while delivering mail on a 95-degree day.
The rule would also require “acclimatization,” letting people gradually get used to working in high heat. Many heat-injury deaths come during a worker’s first days on the job, said Arberry. Chip Bishop III said the proposed acclimatization standards were too strict. David May of the American Society of Safety Professionals told the hearing that they were pretty close to the ANSI (American National Safety Institute) recommendation of four to 14 days.
Many temporary workers don’t get properly acclimatized, the UAW’s Dr. Sivin said, and both the employer and the temp agency often avoid responsibility for that.
“I saw people just fall down,” Freddy Pierre told Work-Bites about his experience as a temporary construction worker on a 32-story building in Miami. Supervisors would have paramedics take them away and bring in another temp to replace them, he recalled.
The heat from the sun gets reflected off the concrete, he added, so “you get cooked on both sides, like a microwave.” They got three scheduled breaks, one for half-an-hour and two for 15 minutes, but “that’s not enough, under that sun. You’re lifting stuff.”
Pierre is an organizer with Beyond the Bars, a COSH-affiliated worker center for temp workers and former prisoners. “We’re not cattle. We’re humans,” he implores. “Just give us some type of standards.”
Both Freedman and Milito indicated their organizations would challenge heat regulations in court. They cited the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in National Federation of Independent Businesses v. OSHA, which ruled that the agency had exceeded its legal powers when it required workers at large employers to get vaccinated against COVID or take weekly tests for the virus. Milito echoed one prong of the Court’s opinion when she said extreme heat, like COVID, is a general public-health hazard, “not an occupational hazard,” and Freedman the other, when he said Congress had not specifically authorized OSHA to regulate exposure to heat.
Unions and worker-safety advocates have also long lamented that OSHA does not have the resources to enforce safety standards. Even before Elon Musk’s DOGE decimated staffing at the Department of Labor earlier this year, OSHA and its state counterparts had less than one inspector for every 2,000 workplaces. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tried to give the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which researches workplace health hazards, a hungry-worm lobotomy—attempting to ax more than 90% of its staff, some 900 workers. The department said it had reinstated 328 workers in May after a West Virginia coal miner filed a lawsuit challenging the cuts.
The AFL-CIO’s Reindel told the panel that those cuts had “removed our right” to use the institute’s expertise.
“We’re hopeful that federal protections will happen,” Moreno-Dominguez says. But even if they don’t, says Brittney Jenkins, “that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be heard. People are dying.”