Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA)

By Tom Conway - CounterPunch, July 17, 2023

The heat index soared to 111 degrees in Houston, Texas, but the real-feel temperature climbed even higher than that inside the heavy personal protective equipment (PPE) that John Hayes and his colleagues at Ecoservices wear on the job.

Sweat poured from the workers clad in full-body hazardous materials suits, heavy gloves, splash hoods, and steel-toed boots as they sampled and processed chemicals from huge metal containers under a searing sun.

Fortunately, as members of the United Steelworkers (USW), these workers negotiated a policy requiring the chemical treatment company to provide shade, cool-down periods, and other measures to protect them during sweltering days.

But unless all Americans have commonsense safeguards like these, workers across the country will continue to get sick and die during ever-worsening heat waves.

The USW, other unions, and advocacy groups are calling on the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to speedily enact a national standard specifying the minimum steps all employers need to take to safeguard workers from unprecedented and deadly bouts of heat.

Because of union advocacy, OSHA already has national standards that protect workers from falls, trench collapses, asbestos exposure, infectious diseases, injuries from equipment, and many other workplace hazards. It’s way past time to also protect workers from the heat waves that are growing more severe, lasting longer, and claiming more lives each year.

“Heat affects everybody. It doesn’t care about age,” observed Hayes, president of USW Local 227’s Ecoservices unit, who helped to negotiate the heat-related protections for about 70 workers in treatment services, maintenance, logistics, and other departments.

“There’s so many things they can come up with,” he said of OSHA officials.

The policy the union negotiated with Ecoservices requires low-cost, sensible measures like water, electrolytes, modified work schedules, tents and fans, and the authority to stop work when conditions become unhealthy and unsafe.

“If you start to feel dizzy or lightheaded, take your timeout,” Hayes reminds coworkers. “Don’t worry about it.”

In 2021, OSHA initiated efforts “to consider a heat-specific workplace rule.” In the meantime, states and local governments are free to make their own rules, let workers fend for themselves, or even put workers at greater risk.

By Union Jake and Adam Keller - Valley Labor Report, July 14, 2023

Shades of Fortunado Reyes and Louisiana-Pacific.

By Barbara Barrett - Stateline, June 30, 2023

Nearly 400 U.S. workers died of heat exposure over a decade.

Even as summer temperatures soar and states wrangle with protecting outdoor workers from extreme heat, Texas last week enacted a law that axes city rules mandating water and shade breaks for construction workers.

In state after state, lawmakers and regulators have in recent years declined to require companies to offer their outdoor laborers rest breaks with shade and water. In some cases, legislation failed to gain traction. In others, state regulators decided against action or have taken years to write and release rules.

Heat causes more deaths in the United States each year than any other extreme weather. And in Texas, at least 42 workers died of heat exposure between 2011 and 2021, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, though labor advocates say the number is much higher because other causes are cited in many deaths.

A 2021 investigation by NPR and Columbia Journalism Investigations found nearly 400 workers had died of environmental heat exposure in the previous decade, with Hispanic workers — who make up much of the nation’s farm and construction workforce — disproportionately affected.

Climate change has brought more days of extreme heat each year on average, and scientists say that number will grow. Yet only three states — California, Oregon and Washington — require heat breaks for outdoor workers. Minnesota has a rule that sets standards for indoor workers, and Colorado’s heat regulations cover only farmworkers.

By Alicia Race - Union of Concerned Scientists, June 15, 2023

What would be the largest single-employer strike in US history may soon be avoided if UPS and the Teamsters union reach an agreement on adding life-saving cooling equipment in more than 90,000 fleet vehicles. UPS is the largest employer here in Louisville, Kentucky, so a strike would have serious implications for the metro region as well as on the entire US economy. UPS workers are asking for protection just as Danger Season has started and the summer is predicted to be hotter than usual. While the cooling equipment is one piece of the worker negotiations, it’s a crucial piece–worker heat protections save lives and are worth fighting like hell for.

My dad often works outdoors in extreme temperatures, so I feel for every single worker and family whose lives have been or could be devastated by preventable heat illness or fatalities.

By Farah Eltohamy - Crosscut, June 15, 2023

Lorena, a former farmworker from Sunnyside, toiled day and night tending to blueberries in Washington’s Yakima Valley for close to a decade.

By year six, Lorena’s employer had elevated her to a supervisory role – which she said she personally took as an opportunity to better advocate for her fellow farmworkers out in the sweltering summer conditions.

Lorena, who asked to be identified by her first name only to avoid any potential reprisal from her former employer, regularly reported any problems she saw with lack of access to adequate water and shade – and over the years was met with repeated retaliation that she said ultimately drove her out of the career in 2021.

The heat is becoming more extreme each passing year, Lorena told Crosscut, but most changes to working conditions seem for “the benefit of the fruit, not for the benefit of farmworkers.” 

Agricultural workers are among those most vulnerable to heat-related illnesses, and according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention they’re dying of heatstroke at a rate nearly 20 times greater than all U.S. civilian workers. 

By Juley Fulcher - Public Citizen, May 25, 2023

Key Findings

• Heat exposure is responsible for as many as 2,000 worker fatalities in the U.S. each year.
• Up to 170,000 workers in the U.S. are injured in heat stress related accidents annually. There is a 1% increase in workplace injuries for every increase of 1° Celsius.
• The failure of employers to implement simple heat safety measures costs the U.S. economy nearly $100 billion every year.
• The dangers of heat stress are overwhelmingly borne by low-income workers. The lowest-paid 20% of workers suffer five times as many heat-related injuries as the highest-paid 20%.
• Worker heat stress tragedies disproportionately strike workers who are low-income, Black or Brown.
• At least 50,000 injuries and illnesses could be avoided in the U.S. each year with an effective OSHA heat standard.
• Employers pay a substantial price for failing to mitigate workplace heat stress including the costs of absenteeism, turnover and overtime due to worker illness or injury, reduced worker productivity, damage to machinery and property from workplace accidents, increased workers’ comp premiums, law suits, and loss of public trust and customers.
• The physical and mental capacity of workers to function drops significantly as heat and humidity increase. Productivity of workers declines approximately 2.6% per degree Celsius above a Wet Bulb Globe Temperature (WBGT) of 24°C (75.2°F). The WBGT is a measure that combines temperature, relative humidity, radiant heat sources (like direct sunlight or heat-generating machinery) and wind speed.
• There are many simple ways employers can mitigate heat stress in the workplace, like access to cool drinking water and adequate “cool down” breaks in a shaded or air-conditioned space.
• It is essential that OSHA issue an interim rule to immediately prevent heat-related illness, injury and death in indoor and outdoor workers, both to protect workers and to reduce the clear burden on the economy.

The right to a safe workplace is a basic human right. Exposure to excessive heat is one of the most dangerous problems facing workers today. Tens of thousands of workers suffer heat illnesses, injuries and fatalities every year in the U.S. This is a toll disproportionately borne by Black and Brown workers, and low-income workers with limited options for safer employment. This is most clearly demonstrated by the plight of farmworkers, who have the highest rate of heat-related worker deaths, and are overwhelmingly immigrant workers with little power to demand workplace reforms from their employers.

Download a copy of this publication here (PDF).

By Kim Kelly - In These Times, May 17, 2023

Black lung is completely preventable. And it’s on the rise again.

“Is that the wind you hear howlin’ through the holler?
Or the ghost of a widow that cries?
For every man that died for a coal company dollar
A lung full of dust and a heart full of lies”
—“It’s About Blood,” Steve Earle (2020)

Adaptation is a way of life for John Moore. He’s worked construction, run a wig shop and now promotes concerts. The wig shop idea came to him because his middle daughter was having trouble styling her thick, curly hair. He didn’t know much about wigs, or hair in general, so he learned and started turning a profit soon after the grand opening. That’s the kind of man he is — someone who’s always looking out for the next opportunity, the next chance to make it.

When we meet, Moore is wearing a black puffer jacket, a black durag, work boots and a cautious smile. He’s soft-spoken but firm, and he lights up when he talks about his wife and three kids. At a glance, he seems strong, the kind of person who can win an arm-wrestling contest or help you move — like a man with a lot of living left to do.

But instead, Moore, at only 42, is dying of black lung disease.

You see, Moore’s résumé also includes a few lines familiar to many people in Central Appalachia. He spent about 11 years running coal and clearing debris in the mines of Southern West Virginia. During that time, a cruel disease took up residence inside his chest cavity. Now, it is slowly destroying him from the inside.

He’s not alone. Across Central Appalachia — and specifically Kentucky, Virginia and West Virginia — coal miners are struggling to breathe. Many of them aren’t much older than Moore — and many are much younger. Journalist Howard Berkes investigated the spike in a series for NPR in 2012, and multiple studies before and after have shown black lung (known more formally as coal workers’ pneumoconiosis, or CWP) has been on the rise for the past decade.

By Ruth Silver Taube - San Jose Spotlight, May 11, 2023

Standards for exposure to toxic chemicals at work, known as permissible exposure limits or PELs, have long been and still are vastly and indefensibly weaker than standards for environmental exposure to these same toxics. This disparity puts not only workers, but also their offspring at risk—especially where women of child-bearing age are a sizable part of the workforce.

The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) acknowledges many of its permissible exposure limits for toxic chemicals in the workplace are outdated and inadequate for ensuring protection of worker health, and have not been updated since 1970. Former agency head David Michaels estimates 90% of OSHA’s PELs date to industry standards of the 1960s and are not safe.

OSHA typically takes more than 10 years to issue a new chemical standard, and has issued only 32 new standards in 50 years. Penalties for breaching these inadequate standards are minimal. OSHA’s maximum penalty for a serious violation is merely $15,625 per violation. Cal/OSHA’s is $25,000.

The only legally enforceable occupational exposure limits at the federal level are OSHA’s PELs. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) has developed a set of recommended exposure limits, and California’s enforceable workplace exposure standards, more stringent than federal standards, are still inadequate.

In “OSHA Permissible Exposure Limits (PELS) Are Too Permissive,” a researcher at Georgia Institute of Technology concluded there’s little reason to believe exposure limits on potentially toxic workplace substances set by any of the regulatory agencies are fully protective against serious adverse health effects.

By staff - Labor Network for Sustainability, April 2, 2023

Seventeen years ago California passed one of the nation’s first workplace heat stress rules. Since then California has been inundated with heat waves resulting from global warming. A new study, “Feeling the Heat: How California’s Workplace Heat Standards Can Inform Stronger Protections Nationwide,” finds that the state’s heat stress rule provides some protection, but that its coverage is limited, it is often unenforced, and that penalties are so modest that many employers simply ignore it. The study calls for expanding the rule to all California workers, increasing enforcement, and establishing a federal heat standard for all workers in the US.

The California rule requires employers to provide heat training, free drinking water, and shade to employees. It covers only outdoor workers, but the study identified heat-related cases in 463 different industries outside agriculture and construction, including janitorial services, home health care, museums, and newspaper publishers.

The study found that hundreds of businesses repeatedly violated the rule but avoided the usually higher fines meted out to repeat violators. UPS received 41 citations for violating the heat standard but was issued only one for a repeat violation.

Only Minnesota, Oregon, Colorado, and Washington have similar workplace heat stress rules. The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has been working for years on a national heat stress standard but none has so far been issued. Rep, Judy Chu and Sen. Alex Padilla of California and Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio have introduced legislation to accelerate development of such a standard.