by Willy Blackmore
With another scorching summer on the horizon — and states either trying and failing to pass heat protections for workers or outright banning them — the Biden Administration is reportedly looking to establish federal rules to protect people from extreme temperatures at both outdoor and indoor jobs.
According to The New York Times, a proposed change to Occupational Safety and Health Act rules could help keep up to 50 million workers — many of whom are Black and Latinx —.safer on the job.
Those two demographic groups comprise 45 percent of the outdoor workforce in particular, while the boom in warehouse jobs and other indoor logistics positions for online retailers like Amazon have hired heavily from Black communities. According to its own data, more than a quarter of Amazon’s overall workforce in 2022 was Black, for example, yet just shy of 9 percent of its white-collar workforce the same year was Black.
Not only are Black and Latinx people overrepresented in jobs where heat is a growing workplace risk; they are also statistically more likely to suffer both heat-related illness and deaths. So it’s fair to say that new federal heat protections for workers would be a big deal for Black labor.
While issues like sea-level rise, flooding, and other dramatic storms that are strengthened by climate change often steal headlines, heat is the deadliest type of extreme weather. In 2023, the hottest year on record, 2,300 people died in the U.S. due to heat-related issues — three times higher than the average for recent years.
“The threat to people from extreme heat is reaching a point where we have to rethink how, at all levels of government, we are preparing and putting in place a response that matches the severity of the problem,” Dr. John M. Balbus, the Health and Human Services Department’s deputy assistant secretary for climate change and health told the Times. He categorized extreme heat, according to the Times, as “the greatest threat to human health posed by climate change.”
OSHA outlined what the rule might look like last month: two thresholds, at a heat index of both 80 and 90 degrees, above which two different sets of safety measures would kick in for both indoor and outdoor workplaces. At 80 degrees, employers would be required to provide water, lighter workloads, and areas for breaks; above 90 degrees the rules would mandate breaks and monitoring for heat-related illnesses.
A rule change at the federal level would supersede local laws like those recently passed in both Florida and Texas that block municipal heat protections for workers; it would also add protections for indoor workers in California after the state’s own efforts to do so failed. But if the pushback against local heat-protection measures are anything to judge by, the Biden Administration’s attempts will face similar challenges too — and the summer weather is already heating up.