The world is getting hotter and workers need protection from the heat. But at a hearing Monday about a proposed heat regulation from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Elizabeth Milito of the National Federation of Independent Businesses said that heat exposure is “not characterized properly as an occupational hazard.” Tell that to the nine workers who, as Claire Brown reported Monday in The New York Times, died last August from working in high temperatures.
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.
My guess is that Trump plans to follow the Chamber of Commerce line, which is typically less coarse than the NFIB’s. The Chamber says that while of course “employers should protect employees from heat-related injuries and illnesses,” the rule OSHA proposed “applies a one-size-fits-all approach, fails to account for regional differences in climate, and creates unworkable requirements for small employers and certain industries.” David Michaels, who ran OSHA during the Obama administration, pointed out to the Times’s Brown that if the Trump administration issues a weak heat standard, then that can be used to nullify more stringent heat standards already imposed in California, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Illinois, Colorado, Minnesota, and Virginia.
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.)
The “one size” in this instance is temperature. Under the rule, when the mercury rises above 80 degrees employers are required to offer workers drinking water and rest breaks, and when it rises above 90 degrees employers are required to monitor workers for signs of heat illness and to impose mandatory rest breaks. The counterargument, made at a House hearing last month by Felicia Watson, a senior counsel at the management-side law firm Littler Mendelson, was this: “I’ve talked to employers in New Mexico that say 80 degrees is a great day to build, it’s perfect weather, and you might have something completely different in Florida.”
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.
I’m going to surprise you now by saying that government regulation of heat exposure is a poor substitute for private enterprise. But before Ms. Milito recruits me for the NFIB, let me explain that the private sector activity I have in mind is union organizing. Unionization is the single free-market activity opposed by every free-market blowhard. Indeed, the business lobby hates unions considerably more than it hates government. But that’s what outdoor workers need: the protection afforded by collective bargaining.
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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