US Labor Advocates Demand Heat Protections for Workers as Planet Warms

Ahead of a hotter than normal summer, activists call for immediate action to protect workers from deadly temperatures. “We shouldn’t be waiting for Donald Trump,” one said.

A father died last summer. His son sat on the porch with a baseball glove waiting for a game he never got to play. The man didn’t die in a fire or a fall from a scaffold. He collapsed under the sun on a job site with no shade, no breaks and no water.

“This story isn’t rare,” said Kenneth Seal, a safety specialist with the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades at a rally for heat justice in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday.

“It happens every summer to someone’s father, someone’s brother, someone’s mother and someone’s daughter, because we think it won’t, because we think they will tough it out,” said Seal. “But toughness doesn’t stop heat stroke. Planning does. If you don’t plan for your workers to work in the heat and you’re gambling with their lives.”

Seal spoke at one of more than a dozen rallies held by a coalition of workers’ rights groups at sites across the nation this week to coincide with hearings held by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, on the country’s first proposed heat standard. 

Last July, 52 years after federal occupational health and safety experts called for a standard to protect workers in hot environments, the Biden administration issued a draft rule. In 2024, 15 workers from New York to California died after performing physically demanding tasks like roofing, pouring concrete, planting tomatoes and clearing trash from a construction site in high heat.

On Monday, the Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration began hearings on the rule.

Nearly 500 workers died of exposure to heat between 2011 and 2022, and nearly 34,000 suffered heat-related illnesses and injuries during that time, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But experts say statistics on occupational heat-related illness and death are likely vast underestimates. Coroners often fail to recognize heat’s deadly effects on heart disease and other underlying conditions and employers’ sometimes don’t report incidents, among other reasons.

The rule would require employers to create a plan to evaluate and manage workplace heat and provide workers with water and cool places to rest on hot days.

“Heat kills more people than any other kind of weather event,” said Jason Walsh, executive director of the BlueGreen Alliance, a coalition of labor and environmental groups, at the D.C. rally. “And as our country has gotten hotter, the number of workers dying from heat has doubled.”

Last year was the hottest on record and the National Weather Service projects hotter-than-average temperatures this summer. 

But Walsh and other advocates see several signs that the Trump administration is unlikely to proceed with a heat standard.

“There are five reasons, at least, why we shouldn’t be waiting for Donald Trump to protect workers,” Walsh said. 

Among those reasons: Trump issued an executive order requiring federal agencies to repeal at least 10 regulations for every new rule. In April, the administration fired nearly all the scientists at the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, or NIOSH, the only agency that provides evidence-based guidance to keep workers safe. Plus, Walsh said, Trump is proposing deep cuts to OSHA’s budget, reducing the number of people who write and enforce the agency’s rules while eliminating resources that help train workers on safety and health. Trump also dramatically cut the number of OSHA inspectors during this first term, Walsh said, leading to a drastic drop in inspections, and Trump is proposing to cut inspections again.

OSHA’s press office did not respond to questions about whether the agency would implement a heat rule.

State Standards Fall Short

In the absence of federal action to protect workers from extreme heat, seven states have passed their own standards, though most have exemptions that leave workers at risk. Two workers died last year in states with some sort of heat rule. 

Last August, 71-year-old Charles Lee, a state oil and gas engineer, was found dead as temperatures soared in Southern California’s Simi Valley, where he had been checking on an oil leak.

That same month, Carlos Perez Najera was collecting trash on a 90-degree day in Colorado when he started feeling dizzy and took a break to cool down. But it was too late. The 19-year old died of multiple organ failure, which the coroner attributed to “heat stroke due to lack of acclimatization and the extreme heat of the day.” 

Colorado’s heat rule applies only to agricultural workers. And in 2024, the hottest year on record, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a law prohibiting municipalities from implementing their own heat rules, following Texas, which passed a ban the year before.

On Monday, the first day of the heat rule hearings, industry representatives argued for a performance-oriented standard that allows employers to develop their own heat-illness plans and criticized the proposal’s use of a heat threshold as a trigger for employers to take steps to protect workers.

Elizabeth Milito, senior executive counsel for the National Federation of Independent Business, opposed the heat standard on behalf of the nearly 300,000 businesses her organization represents. 

“We have heard from members in California in particular that it is extraordinarily difficult for them to comply with a one-size-fits-all heat standard given its sheer impracticality, vagueness and costs,” Milito said. 

Requiring inflexible break schedules can create hazards in industries like tree care, where workers need to climb up and down, she said. “While excessive heat presents a hazard that must be addressed, employers have proven that they can provide safe workplaces for employees during these times.”

Milito acknowledged that many federal rules and regulations aren’t always followed, but she objected to piling on more. 

Jordan Barab, who served as OSHA deputy assistant secretary under President Barack Obama, asked Milito if she had any solutions to encourage or force employers to comply with mandatory standards. “There’s always room for more training and compliance assistance from federal agencies,” Milito said.

Marc Freedman, vice president of workplace policy for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, also objected to the one-size-fits-all approach as unfeasible for the country’s millions of employers in different climates.

“The proposed standard makes no allowances for differences in workplaces and employee sensitivity, nature of the job or task or any of the other many variables associated with determining how to protect employees from overexposure to heat,” said Freedman, who said he was surprised to see the hearings proceed under this administration. “Ninety degrees in Phoenix is not the same as 90 degrees in New Orleans or Houston or Portland, Maine.”

The standard uses two heat indexes—measures of what temperature and humidity feel like to the body—starting at 80 degrees Fahrenheit, to trigger employer requirements to make accommodations such as providing adequate water, rest and shade based on a robust review of scientific evidence. The study analyzed 14 publications totaling 570 heat-related deaths and found that “almost all deaths” occurred when the heat index was above 80 degrees, a so-called “heat death line” that the rule proposes as the initial trigger.

“If OSHA insists on requiring a specific key trigger, there should be only one to simplify what employers must do,” Freedman said. “That threshold must be higher than the 80 degrees, which, even when humidity is considered, is not a threat.”

Scott Schneider, a worker safety expert and former director of occupational safety and health for the Laborers’ Health and Safety Fund of North America, asked Freedman if he had any scientific evidence that 80 degrees is not a threat. 

“It’s based on what I hear from my employers, from my members, about where temperatures matter,” Freedman replied.

A Haunting Memory

Back at the rally in D.C., Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) said 2025 was on track to be one of the hottest years on record. And heat is already killing workers outside at construction sites and farms and inside warehouses and trucks and factories and kitchens, he said, adding that the impact isn’t felt equally.

“The impact of extreme heat might not be equal, but the solution should be that every worker should clock into work knowing they will return home safely at the end of their shift,” he said.

He outlined the urgent need for the heat safety rule.

“To anyone who says we should not have the strongest possible standards to protect workers from extreme heat, consider this,” he said. “The worker harvesting crops in the sweltering heat without water or access to emergency medical care, the delivery worker who collapses on your front step or unconsciously swerves into you on the road because they are forced to drive without air conditioning, and the construction worker who dies of heat stroke because they were not provided shade or breaks. Not one single worker’s life or health is worth the risk of scaling back these regulations.”

Even if OSHA adopts the heat standard, it takes an average of seven years for the agency to move a rule from introduction to implementation. That’s why Markey is working with other senators to require OSHA to protect workers in high heat environments with immediate and enforceable standards, including protections like access to water, time limits on heat exposure and emergency medical responses.

Jazmin Moreno Dominguez, a community organizer and representative of the Arizona Heat Coalition, advocates for worker heat protections in the state. But she didn’t speak at the rally as an organizer. She spoke as a daughter who has feared the summer months for as long as she can remember.

“One summer in particular is forever ingrained in my memory,” she said. “Ten years ago, my father came home from work drenched in sweat, unrecognizable. His skin was pale. He could barely stand. He was sick for over a week, and yet there was still no paid time off, no medical attention, but more importantly, no policy in place to protect it from happening.”

Today, her father is across the country in Arizona fighting for his life in heat that exceeds 110 degrees. “He’s wrapped in a cooling vest, a scarf around his neck dipped in ice water and a hat fighting to stay alive on the job site, a routine he has done for the past 30 years in the state,” Moreno Dominguez said.

That’s because there’s still no policy in place.

“We do not need more studies, we do not need more panels, we know what needs to be done,” Moreno Dominguez said. “What remains unclear is, when will our elected officials finally act?”

Extreme heat is already knocking at the door of every worker clocking in before the sun rises, she said. It’s at the door of every child who watches their parents leave and quietly pray that they come back that same day after work.

“We are calling on our elected officials to do their jobs,” Moreno Dominguez said. “Please give my father the opportunity to come home safe.”

Cover photo:  A construction worker takes a break to wipe his brow while digging a trench amidst a heat wave in Irvine, Calif., on Sept. 5, 2024. Credit: Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images