It was 100 degrees in Baltimore the day Ronald Silver II died on the job last summer. He had already taken time off from his sanitation job that week to recover from body cramps, a symptom of heat-related illness recognized by the U.S. Army and federal agencies. But he was worried about getting in trouble with supervisors, a report from the city’s inspector general shows, so he went back to work on August 2, ready to make 1,153 trash pickups over the course of another long day.
The garbage trucks of Baltimore have what numerous employees told the inspector general was “inadequate air-conditioning,” if they have it at all, and exhaust fumes can make the area behind the trucks 20 degrees hotter than the outside temperature. Silver suffered in those conditions for hours on the last day of his life, and the IG report describes a crescendo of distress. His vision was blurry; he was exhausted and disoriented. By 11 a.m., he was struggling to walk. Around 4 p.m., he fell to the ground. Water was no help. He stopped breathing. CPR revived him enough to vomit. He spoke of leg pain, cramping, chest pain. Paramedics arrived at 4:21 p.m. and took him to the hospital. By 5:05 p.m., he was gone. Silver was 35.
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Deaths like Silver’s could be avoided with a federal heat standard, which the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) proposed under the Biden administration last year. The rule would require employers to protect workers in extreme heat with cool-down shelter, water, and in extreme heat, mandatory rest breaks.
But the Trump administration has given no indication of whether it will complete the rulemaking process. Throughout June and early July, OSHA held informal hearings on the proposal, which has drawn more than 50,000 comments. One day provided a potent demonstration of overheating: A hearing was delayed because the air-conditioning broke at the location, in the Department of Labor building.
But OSHA has been silent since then, advocates said. The typical process at this point would be to take all the comments into consideration and use them to pass a final standard with an implementation date. But rulemaking can take up to two years, and there’s no guarantee that Trump’s OSHA will finalize the rule at all. So even in the best-case scenario, workers can expect at least another summer working in overheated conditions, with some facing dire consequences. And we haven’t seen a lot of best-case scenarios in the past six months. Spokespeople for OSHA did not respond to a request for comment by deadline.
HEAT IS THE TOP WEATHER-RELATED KILLER, accounting for dozens of workers’ deaths and thousands of injuries every year. An average of 34 workers died every year from environmental heat between 1992 and 2022, data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows. An average of 3,389 workers were injured or ill because of heat between 2011 and 2020.
The OSHA heat standard proposed last year primarily tied its requirements to the heat index, which describes how the heat actually feels when temperature and humidity are combined. At a heat index of 80 degrees, employers covered under the rule, including those overseeing “outdoor and indoor work in all general industry, construction, maritime, and agriculture sectors where OSHA has jurisdiction,” would be required to give workers cold water and a place to cool down, along with a way to lower the temperature at an indoor worksite. It would require additional care when the heat index reaches 90 degrees, including 15-minute mandatory rest breaks every two hours and observations for symptoms of heat-related illness.
The measures are commonsense and backed by research as lifesaving, advocates said. If implemented, they would impact roughly 36 million workers.
Just getting to the 2024 proposed rule was a struggle, said Anastasia Christman, senior policy analyst at the National Employment Law Project. “Heat exposure was one of the workplace issues that was talked about during the very debates to establish OSHA, so we’ve known this has been a problem for a long time,” she explained.
The administration drastically reduced the 1,400-strong workforce of the organization that funds and develops the research supporting OSHA rules.
Biden’s was “the only administration to do anything about it,” she said. But the Trump administration, meanwhile, “has not yet demonstrated the same kind of commitment to advancing new standards for worker safety, addressing climate changes and the effects of climate change,” or even acknowledged that heat is a major workplace issue, she said.
Some advocates were cheered by the fact that the OSHA heat standard was not on a list of 63 workplace regulations that Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer has vowed to repeal or revise, and that hearings were at least held. But federal funding cuts and layoffs, Christman noted, are a bleaker sign.
The administration last month drastically reduced the 1,400-strong workforce of the organization that funds and develops the research supporting OSHA rules; the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health now has fewer than 150 workers. That loss will only worsen the chronic underfunding and understaffing at OSHA, advocates said, and make it much harder to take the prescribed steps to finalize agency rules.
There’s also the matter of OSHA’s new administrator, David Keeling, who, as the Prospect recently noted, ran the workplace safety program at UPS and Amazon, both of which have seen workers suffer in the past due to extreme heat conditions in delivery trucks and warehouses.
FIVE STATES HAVE THEIR OWN HEAT STANDARDS. California was the first to implement one covering outdoor workers in 2006; last summer, it also enacted regulation covering indoor workers. Colorado and Oregon’s standards likewise cover both indoor and outdoor workers. Minnesota covers indoor worksites; Washington covers outdoor sites.
More states are considering joining the group, including Maryland and New Jersey, both of which last year proposed standards to cover both indoor and outdoor workers. The legislation in New Jersey stalled after the legislature went on recess, said Nedia Morsy, director of Make the Road New Jersey, so her organization started visiting different cities across the state every week this summer to tell workers about the need for a heat standard.
“Folks are really surprised when they hear there aren’t adequate protections for working in the heat,” she said. A federal standard would strengthen workers’ position against heat and against bosses who refuse to protect them, advocates said. The need for state-level regulation is urgent, she said, because the “federal government is not in a position, nor is interested, in protecting workers.”
Christman was heartened that some states were moving quickly to adopt heat standards. “There could be a dozen states that have these protections,” she said. “But that does nothing to help the workers without those protections.”
Morsy called the response from employers in states considering heat standards a “mixed bag,” with some preferring to ignore the issue or saying it will hurt the economy to force them to protect workers. “The frustration is that people will die,” Morsy said. “How will you have an economy if people are unwell and unsafe in their workplace?”
It’s likewise a struggle to get bosses to comply with heat standards where one is in place. In California, for example, there’s no way to monitor the 60,000 farms to make sure workers are getting mandatory access to water, shade, and rest, said Teresa Romero, president of United Farm Workers.
“Even though we have these regulations, the majority of employers are not following them,” she said. “The laws on the books are not the laws in the field.”
Building power to win heat regulations has been challenging for organizers, especially among immigrant workers, who compose much of the farmworking, meatpacking, construction, and other industries where workers are especially vulnerable to heat. Morsy said some workers who have come to Make the Road say they’re nervous to speak up about the heat because the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign might make it easier for their boss to simply get rid of them, “even if the employer hasn’t made that threat.”
WHILE WORKERS LABORING OUTSIDE are the most obviously exposed to harmful temperatures, workers indoors face heat injuries, too, like Sarah Hager, who teaches art (what she calls “the best subject”) at Cleveland Middle School in New Mexico.
Even with a swamp cooler turned on full blast, Hager’s classroom gets so hot that her students can’t concentrate. She’s made her classroom welcoming, with strings of lights that change colors, posters, and a wall dedicated to students’ work. “Kids look around and say, ‘Oh my God,’” when they come through the door and see the space full of color and natural light. “They love it.”
But when the Albuquerque heat drives the temperature in her classroom to 85 degrees, her students struggle to focus, especially when they come in from a lunch break spent running around outside. Sometimes, they feel so unwell that they ask to see the nurse, who tells Hager later that the kid was “just hot. They needed a glass of water. They needed ice on their neck,” Hager said. “I’m glad kids feel like they can ask for that, but they shouldn’t have to.” The heat affects her, too, making her sweat so much that she has to run cover with a joke.
“I started to embrace the fact that I would be like, ‘Hey, guys, I’m sweating really hard right now,’ and they laugh,” said Hager, 41. “We have to be the ones that say, ‘Oh, it’s not that bad,’ but it’s actually quite terrible.”
The original heat standard proposal notes multiple studies on the negative effects of heat on mental performance, including student test scores. But Hager said it might not be obvious to most people that their own children are in schools where that’s an issue, because their reference point is how school felt to them, years ago. Working in the 60-year-old school she went to as a child herself has illustrated how much the climate has changed, and how poorly prepared the buildings are to handle it.
“I don’t have memories of it being wildly uncomfortable,” Hager said, “and that just goes to show you how much the climate has changed.”