Waiting For Federal Rule To Protect Workers From Dangerous Heat

By Benjamin J. Hulac
Washington Correspondent For the NJ Spotlight News

WASHINGTON — Millions of workers in the U.S. would gain access to water, rest breaks and shade, and employers would be required to draft plans to protect their workers from dangerous heat, under a federal regulation the Trump administration is drafting.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration would enforce the regulation, which is not finalized and would cover about 36 million workers across indoor and outdoor settings that OSHA oversees.

“It’s there. It’s waiting. It’s written. It’s been researched,” Rep. Donald Norcross (D-1st), who trained as an electrician and sits on the House committee that oversees labor issues, said in an interview with NJ Spotlight News. “It’s something that makes sense.”

Trump guts agency critical to worker safety as temperatures riseAs humans warm the Earth by burning fossil fuels and tearing down rainforests, a national heat standard would likely save the lives of workers in industries particularly vulnerable to extreme heat, such as agriculture and construction.

It could also protect people like the three workers, stationed at an Amazon warehouse in Carteret, who died during the summer in 2022. Or the Dallas postal worker Eugene Gates, who died in 2023 when the heat index hit 113 degrees Fahrenheit. Or baggage handlers on a scorching airport blacktop.

“You go in the back of a truck, a tractor trailer or something for deliveries where it’s 120 degrees, that’s a bad day,” Norcross said, adding that he’s been on job sites where people collapsed from the heat.

Years before enactment?

Started during the Biden administration, the proposed rule has endured during the Trump administration, though OSHA could weaken or scrap it entirely. If it does survive the rule-making process, years could pass before the rule is enacted.

The U.S. has never had a national heat standard for workers, though seven states — California, Colorado, Maryland, Minnesota, Nevada, Oregon and Washington — have occupational heat safety standards in place, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental law group.

New Jersey is one of 10 states with pending legislation to create their own standards under state law. New Mexico is also developing a standard for workers. The New Jersey bill to create standards passed an Assembly committee last year and needs final approval in the Assembly as well as action in the Senate.

About 1.26 million New Jersey workers are employed in industries at high risk for extreme heat hazards, according to federal data NRDC compiled.

Thirty-four people died of heat-related causes on the job nationwide on average every year, from 1992 to 2022, according to federal labor data.

Of that group, 334 of the people who died worked in construction — accounting for about 34% of all heat-linked deaths.

The total death count is likely low because extreme heat can exacerbate underlying chronic health issues, like cardiovascular diseases, making it difficult for medical examiners to pinpoint prolonged heat exposure as the cause of death.

Officials in New Jersey do not track deaths related to heat directly, though nearly 200 people in the state died from heat stroke between 2000 and 2020, according to state figures.

Resistance to regulation

Last summer was the hottest in recorded history, one season in the hottest year in recorded history, which supplanted 2023 for that record.

The past 10 years have been the 10 hottest in centuries of record-keeping, according to the World Meteorological Organization.

Lawmakers urge new protections for workers facing extreme heatThe proposed OSHA rule, as drafted, operates under a two-tiered system. When the heat index reaches 80 degrees Fahrenheit, companies must provide water and areas for workers to take breaks. When it hits 90, 15-minute breaks every two hours are required.

New Jersey business groups opposed the rule. The 80-degree trigger is “too low” and could scare away business, according to an attorney for the Employers Association of New Jersey, a trade group, who filed comments against the proposal.

The association has a “preference for a nationwide standard to avoid competitive disadvantages for states like New Jersey,” wrote the lawyer, Andrée Peart Laney.

Aspects of the resistance in NJ

Elissa Frank, vice president of government affairs at the New Jersey Business & Industry Association, another trade group, told OSHA in part that “mandatory breaks, rest periods, and other interventions could significantly impact productivity, especially in industries with time-sensitive tasks, such as agriculture, construction, and logistics.”

New Jersey Farm Bureau president Allen Carter took issue with the heat thresholds.

He also objected to the idea that the rule would apply indoors, where “produce is cleaned, sorted and packed for delivery to markets.”

“The common practice for packing facilities in large buildings, typically with large entry doors (large enough for tractors and trucks to enter), has some form of ventilation fans,” Carter wrote in a Jan. 14 letter to OSHA. “Although it may be warm and hit the 90-degree trigger, workers are under shade with fans and drinking water readily available.”

Other New Jersey groups bristled, too.

New Jersey Transit wants an exemption so its staff can keep trains and buses running on time during hot days, and the head of the New Jersey Gasoline, Convenience Store, Automotive Association, Eric Blomgren, said the rule could interfere with the state law that bans the public from fueling their cars.

If a gas station worker, Blomgren wrote, “is on the mandatory break required by this regulation, then gasoline will no longer be available for sale at that location for that time period, much to the annoyance of the motoring public who could perform the basic service themselves.”

David Keeling, a former executive of UPS and Amazon, is the Trump administration’s nominee to lead OSHA.

Supporters say it would be lifesaving

“I think it will save lives if it goes through,” said Kate Schapira, who writes and teaches about climate change and community resilience at Brown University, in Rhode Island, of the proposal.

Though climate advocacy groups and labor unions are sometimes at odds, both sides are aligned over the OSHA proposal, she said.

“This heat standard is a really good example of labor concerns coming together with climate concerns to create a more just reality within the climate conditions that we’re already seeing,” Schapira said in an interview with NJ Spotlight News.

The measure before OSHA illuminates the work of people who are in “invisibilized, precarious, often ill-paid jobs” — those who work to clean airplanes, hospitals, kitchens or as home health-care workers, she said.

Labor can be a good point for the public to reckon with and grasp climate change, said Schapira, who has written about climate anxiety.

“The converse of that is that if you’re in the habit of minimizing the importance of the work that people do to keep the world that you live in running, then it won’t be compelling to you,” Schapira said. “If you’re the kind of person who says things like ‘unskilled labor’ you’re not going to be moved by that.”