The Biden administration on Friday officially kicked off its public comment period for a newly proposed rule from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration that would mandate certain requirements to protect workers against dangers of extreme heat on the job. You can find the full text of the proposal here and submit your own thoughts on it here.
The proposed federal rule — the first of its kind — would cover approximately 36 million indoor and outdoor workers in the U.S., from construction workers to agricultural workers, delivery drivers, restaurant employees who labor in hot kitchens, and others.
The proposal was explained in greater detail in July, but is still subject to input from the public and industry stakeholders, and could take some time to finalize under OSHA’s typical regulatory process for rule-making. If former president and Republican nominee for president Donald Trump returns to the White House, the rule could also be scrapped altogether, if Trump's record on workplace health and safety is any indication.
Furthermore, under a federal loophole that’s been in place since OSHA’s inception, only private sector workers in Florida would be covered by the rule — leaving out hundreds of thousands of public employees who are otherwise left to whatever protections or enforcement mechanism their individual employer creates. While state leaders have had (and still have) the opportunity to opt those public employees into federal OSHA protection, they have not done so, leaving public workers who help fix traffic lights, drive kids to school, and clear the roads after storms vulnerable to workplace hazards.
Even still, many labor advocates have praised the proposal, while urging for greater speed in implementation and admitting it’s long overdue. As Orlando Weekly previously reported, the new rule from the Biden administration contains a number of proposals that ultimately aim to establish basic mandates, such as coming up with a heat injury and illness prevention plan.
It also proposes establishing two heat index thresholds requiring certain protections for workers, such as water breaks, once job site temperatures exceed 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Other protections, such as mandatory 15-minute rest breaks every two hours, would kick in once the heat index surpasses 90 degrees.
While OSHA — a workplace health and safety regulation agency — currently has rules in place that are meant to generally require workplaces covered by the agency to be hazard-free, there is currently no federal standard that specifically addresses heat-related illness, a growing problem both in Florida and elsewhere.
Last year, the U.S. saw more than 2,300 deaths tied to extreme heat, the Associated Press reported, representing the highest number in 45 years of records. A 2022 report from Public Citizen found that farmworkers, many of whom are immigrants, are the most vulnerable to heat-related death and illnesses (such as acute kidney injury and stroke), followed by construction workers, who made up more than one-third of the total heat-related deaths in the U.S. between 1992 and 2016.
“This is really not an issue that is isolated to any one industry, any one demographic, or any one region,” Acting U.S. Labor Secretary Julie Su told Orlando Weekly last month, ahead of a trip to Orlando to discuss the proposed rule. “There have been some states and also some cities that have taken it upon themselves to develop heat standards to protect workers,” she continued, referencing laws passed in state like California, Washington, Oregon, and Minnesota. “Unfortunately, in both Florida and in Texas, the governor of those states told cities, ‘You can't do that.’”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis earlier this year signed into law an industry-backed bill (HB 433) that, in part, bans city and county governments from coming up with their own heat protection standards, in the absence of state action, to protect workers in their communities. Email and phone communications sent by lobbyists to state lawmakers earlier this year revealed a multi-industry push to see the state ban cross the finish line, in response to a local effort underway in Miami-Dade County that had sought to establish certain protections for workers in the construction and agricultural industries.
Public comment on the Biden administration’s rule — open to anyone and everyone who has thoughts on workplace heat protection — launched Friday, Aug. 30, and will last through Dec. 30. As of publication, about 500 people have already weighed in.
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