The heat rule was proposed last year by the Biden administration, and for good reason: According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, heat-related deaths have risen 117 percent in this century. When the rule came out, I predicted that if Donald Trump won the election he’d kill it. He hasn’t killed it yet, and indeed OSHA (to which Trump applied a meat axe in his proposed 2026 budget) went ahead this week with its hearings on the heat standard. But that doesn’t mean the rule will be unmolested by Trump’s deregulatory spree.
We have heard the “one size fits all” complaint before. “One size fits all,” explains the former OSHA official Jordan Barab in his worker-safety newsletter Confined Space, “is the kind of meaningless one-size-fits-all phrase that Republicans and the business community have used for every OSHA standard ever proposed.” Not that you asked, but the rhetorical term for an adjective or adjectival phrase that describes itself is “autological.” Other autological clichés the Chamber hurls at the heat standard are “burdensome,” “overreach,” and “broad.” (If ChatGPT isn’t writing the Chamber’s policy papers, it will be soon.)
I’m not surprised to hear employers say that, because they aren’t the ones working in outdoor heat. If any metric is uniform across the country, surely it’s the Fahrenheit scale. The human body’s ability to endure its upper registers varies from person to person, but not from region to region. Granted, humid regions can make 90 degrees more unpleasant, but a dry 90 degrees is no picnic either. And anyway, Florida and Texas, two of the “most persistently humid states,” according to The Washington Post, have both passed laws preventing local governments from imposing heat regulations on outdoor work.
Roughly one-third of all workers are exposed regularly to outdoor conditions: highway maintenance workers, roofers, crossing guards, mail carriers, construction workers, and so on. Mail carriers, who are unionized, enjoy some protections. But most outdoor workers don’t have a union. Even the construction industry has gone scab; 90 percent of construction workers these days are nonunion. Workers are more dependent on OSHA than they should be, for protection from heat exposure and from other safety hazards, because only six percent of all American workers in the private sector, indoors or out, have a union to protect them.
Unfortunately, OSHA moves at a snail’s pace. Even before DOGE starting laying waste to it, the agency had, in Barab’s words, “a tiny budget” of $632 million and was “severely understaffed.” The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which DOGE gutted, recommended 53 years ago that OSHA create a heat standard. OSHA pledged to do so in 2021 and issued its proposal three years later, which is practically a land-speed record. If Trump now waters the final rule down this will join his long list of climate-denial policies and anti-labor policies. My advice to outdoor workers echoes Joe Hill: Don’t mourn. Organize.
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