The Biden administration is developing a federal heat standard to protect vulnerable workers

“A lot of the standard setting processes are White House reviews, and when the White House has issues, things can get delayed,” Berkowitz said. While there will almost certainly be some pushback from opposing industry groups that want to slow down the rule’s enactment, she predicts that with proper resources and the Biden administration’s backing, the first federal heat standard could be put into effect in under four years. “There are already three states that have some form of this standard. It’s water, rest, shade, acclimatization. Those are the key ingredients.”

As OSHA begins the effort to draft a rule, the White House said the agency will take additional steps to help protect workers in the short-term. Among them is the prioritization of “heat-related interventions and workplace inspections” when the heat index exceeds 80 degrees. The agency is also creating a National Emphasis Program, which will devote more staff and resources to inspections in workplaces with a high risk of heat injury, and a Heat Illness Prevention Work Group to provide a better understanding of the challenges and best approaches for protecting workers from heat injuries.  

“It’s very encouraging that OSHA came out with, besides the plans for a new standard, a whole program to put in place immediately, in terms of better enforcement, using all of the tools that they have to focus and emphasize heat-related illness in the workplace,” said Peter Dooley, a health and safety consultant at the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health, a worker advocacy group. “I think it’s a really important milestone about acknowledging the severity of the hazard that’s been in the workplace for forever.”

The dangers of heat exposure at the workplace aren’t new. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BOL) found that in 2019, there were 43 work-related deaths due to environmental heat exposure, and at least 2,410 other workers suffered serious injuries and illnesses, despite heat illnesses being “largely preventable.” Meanwhile, a recent study found that from 2001 to 2018 in California, hotter daily temperatures resulted in an additional 20,000 workplace injuries, both indoors and out. 

The persistence of these workplace hazards was on display this past summer, as workers endured the devastating effects of increasing heat waves exacerbated by climate change. For some, conditions at their worksites proved fatal, as was the case with an Oregon farmworker who died in June while moving irrigation lines in 104-degree heat. Fast-food workers like Leticia Reyes, an employee at a Jack in the Box in Sacramento, California, ultimately turned to strikes and walkouts to force their employers to remedy the lack of air-conditioning as outside temperatures soared past 100 degrees. “[T]he Biden administration has heard our demands and recognized that fast-food workers, farm workers and other essential workers need new rules in place to keep us safe as climate change leads to longer, hotter and more suffocating summers,” Reyes, a member of the Fight for $15 movement, said to The Counter in an email. 

Even if OSHA proves successful in developing its heat standard expediently, some are skeptical about how much business interests might interfere with the rule’s potential to demonstrably change conditions for workers. Elizabeth Strater, director of strategic campaigns for United Farm Workers, said that based on her prior experience with the agency’s rule-making process, representatives from the agriculture industry will make the case that a paid-break mandate will cost them.

“When workers are working for piece rate, and in really high temperatures, they’re not taking any breaks and not being paid by the hour, so if they took a break, it would cost them money,” Strater said. Ideally, an employer would implement paid shade breaks. But that presents a bottom-line concern for employers. “If the employer is required to provide paid rest breaks during high temperatures for a few dollars, some of them would rather risk worker lives than pay them the few dollars it takes for the worker to take a break to cool their core body temperature down.”