America Is Failing to Protect Workers From Extreme Heat

This summer, the climate crisis has brought intense heat and toxic wildfire smoke to much of the country. These conditions are threats to us all, but they are particularly lethal to those who work outside, in the nation’s fields or construction sites, and even to some who work indoors.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the federal agency I ran under President Barack Obama, has no rule requiring protection from extreme heat. How to prevent heat illness and death is no mystery: Provide workers with adequate rest breaks in the shade or a cool area where they can rehydrate. But many employers will not do so unless they are forced, and unfortunately, OSHA is unlikely to require these basic protections any time soon.

I am not blaming the agency leadership or its staff—the people who work there are dedicated professionals committed to ensuring that people are safe at their jobs. The problem lies with Congress, which has failed to update the weak law it enacted more than half a century ago creating OSHA, and has refused to provide the agency with anywhere near the resources it needs to fulfill its mission. This weakness has been compounded by court decisions that have handcuffed OSHA. The result is that standards for common hazards take many years and often decades to be issued and enforced.  

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Inspections are probably OSHA’s most well-known activity, but the agency’s most powerful tools, the ones that prevent the most injuries and illnesses, are OSHA standards—such as the rules that limit workplace exposures to asbestos or require roofers and window washers to be protected from falls. When the agency issues a new rule, most employers try to comply. OSHA standards change conditions at hundreds or sometimes thousands of workplaces, often very quickly. Inspections are there to send a reminder to employers who don’t comply, but most employers comply voluntarily.

However, OSHA’s standard-setting process is broken. The 2016 permissible-exposure limit (PEL), which limited workplace silica exposure, took 19 years to complete. The agency has issued new or strengthened fewer than 40 PELs since OSHA began in 1971. The remaining 90 percent date to industry-consensus standards set in the 1960s and, in a remarkable admission for a federal agency, OSHA recommends that employers comply with other, stronger voluntary standards.  

President Joe Biden directed OSHA to begin work on a heat standard, but even with that goal as a high priority, OSHA is years away from a standard. Although the likely core of the rule—a plan to provide water, rest, and shade calibrated to the heat index—is uncomplicated, the cost of paying outdoor workers for even a few minutes every hour when they aren’t working is high and will generate substantial opposition, especially from the powerful agriculture and home-building industries. Furthermore, workers who are paid by the piece, including many farmworkers, would be penalized if they are given time off with no additional pay to make up for the crops not picked during breaks. OSHA will have to address these complexities in order to issue a set of rules that withstand the legal challenges that inevitably follow every new OSHA health standard.

Until OSHA issues a comprehensive national standard, states and localities can require employers to better protect workers from heat. California, Oregon, and Washington, states that have their own state OSHA programs, do have heat standards, and Maryland is considering issuing one. However, others are leaders in the opposite direction. Texas, for example, just enacted a law overriding local ordinances that require employers in cities such as Austin and Dallas to provide outdoor workers with modest 10-minute rest-and-rehydration breaks every four hours. Texas is suffering through a prolonged, brutal heat wave, with triple-digit thermometer readings that are among the highest on the planet.

Besides heat, wildfire smoke presents another climate-change-induced crisis that OSHA must deal with. The tiny toxic particles in wildfire smoke have been linked with increased risk of heart attack , stroke , lung cancer , and decline in cognitive function, and are particularly hazardous to workers with respiratory diseases such as asthma. After years of disastrous fires, California and Oregon now have rules requiring workers to be protected from the wildfire smoke, but federal OSHA has no standard for the smoke that presents significant risks to outdoor workers, including in urban areas that have not been previously inundated with wildfire smoke.

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Respirators—personal protective equipment that are fitted tightly over the mouth and nose so that inhaled air is filtered before it enters the lungs—can decrease exposure to wildfire smoke and to airborne viruses, but many employers are unprepared to provide the types of respirators that are needed. According to a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, the nation is currently unable to meet the needs of the public and workers facing smoke, viruses, and other airborne hazards; NASEM recommends the federal government encourage development of new respiratory-protection devices and stockpile them to be disseminated when emergencies arise.

But without OSHA standards requiring their use, most employers are unlikely to implement adequate worker-protection programs. The current crisis demands stronger standards, and OSHA needs congressional help to respond adequately. At the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, Congress directed OSHA to quickly issue the blood-borne-pathogen standard that played a major role in making health-care facilities safer for workers and patients. Following this approach, Congress could direct OSHA to fast-track new rules for heat and respiratory protection. Or, better yet, it could allow OSHA to overhaul the agency’s standard-setting process so that it can issue standards more quickly—for this crisis, and for others yet to come.