The first week of hearings in which business and worker groups provided revisions on the proposed federal rule to prevent heat-related illnesses in the workplace ended with both sides wanting revisions to the rule including providing companies with needed “flexibility,” while employee advocates say revisions must include providing workers with the ability to stop work if heat conditions become dangerous.

On Aug. 30, 2024, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) issued the proposed heat-injury rule, the Heat Injury and Illness Prevention in Outdoor and Indoor Work Settings that would apply to all employers conducting outdoor and indoor work in all general industries where OSHA has jurisdiction, including in the construction, maritime, and agriculture sectors.

OSHA set Jan. 14, 2025 as the deadline to submit comments on the proposed rule, but the agency also set June 16, 2025 as the first day of 12-days of public hearings on the rule that ends on July 2, 2025.

Among the groups opposed to the rule as currently written include the Employers Heat Illness Prevention Rulemaking Coalition (EHIPRC), which had as its main speaker Beeta Lashkari, a lawyer, who said the coalition represents every size employer from large international corporations to small businesses with brick and mortar locations, and those industries include construction, manufacturing, energy, delivery and distribution, retail, warehousing, petroleum refineries, and liquid terminal operations.

The EHIPRC’s motivation is to ensure OSHA promulgates a heat injury and illness prevention standard that is effective in its purpose protecting workers from heat illness hazards, but also reasonable in the burdens it places on employers, Lashkari said.

Therefore, the EHIPRC outlined its “key concerns” with the proposed rule, and with that the final rule be revised to “provide maximum flexibility for employers” meaning having the rulemaking not implement “a one-size fits all standard,” said Lashkari, who added “Promulgating a one-size fits all standard as reflected in the proposed rule as drafted, will make compliance impossible for numerous employers, including most coalition members. The focus should instead be on providing maximum flexibility to employers and embracing that performance based approach.”

By “crafting the standard as performance based makes sense for many reasons,” she said, with those reasons being the diverse set of employers and industries intended to be covered will require varied approaches by necessity.

Also, because of the nature of the hazard there is substantial complexity with respect to heat trigger thresholds that require examining various factors, which again, vary from place to place, Lashkari said.

In addition, there are countless effective approaches to address heat hazards, although EHIPRC members existing programs tend to include elements like water, rest and training, the members “recognize that even for those employers in the same industry, the details of these programs are very different” from location to location, Lashkari said.

Lashkari added that the “common theme” in EHIPRC’s proposal is that the members “urge OSHA to promulgate a standard that is performance based and that gives employers maximum flexibility to allow them to implement engineering and administrative controls that are feasible and appropriate for their workplaces and activities.”

The panel conducting the hearing then heard Ellie Barbarash, a senior health and safety advocate at the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) union that “strongly supports OSHA’s heat illness and injury prevention proposal,” and urges “OSHA to issue a final standard, which, as many have said, is long overdue.”

Barbarash opened her testimony by telling the story of Ronald Silver, a Baltimore, Md. sanitation worker who died of heat exposure on Aug 2, 2024 while working a 10-hour shift in temperatures that surpassed 100 degrees. The water provided to Silver’s truck was depleted before the hottest part of the day, and he collapsed and died on a Baltimore resident’s porch after asking for water.

The Baltimore Department of Public Works (DPW) was not required to develop a heat illness prevention (HIP) plan, so neither Silver or his co workers or his supervisors had been trained to recognize or respond to heat stress or heat emergencies and could not respond appropriately to his heat stress as it occurred, Barbarash said. Furthermore, Silver lacked the right to exercise stop work authority without risking his job, “even with his life at risk,” she said.

Barbarash also cited a Harvard Law School report that examined the effectiveness of workplace heat regulations in saving lives related to outdoor work. The report examined two decades of data from Arizona, California, Nevada and Oregon researching if heat illness prevention regulations are affected or not, she said.

The focus of the Harvard report was climate and heat-death-rates in California connected to outside work before and after implementation of the Cal/OSHA Heat Illness Prevention Standard that applies to all outdoor places of employment such as those in the agriculture, construction, and landscaping industries. The Harvard researchers compared the fatality rates in California to rates in the neighboring states over the same period, including Arizona, Nevada, and Oregon where no heat illness prevention rules were in place at the time, according to Barbarash.

Highlights from the Harvard report focused on a heat wave in 2005 that led to multiple farm worker deaths in California, spurring the first U.S. heat regulation by Cal/OSHA in 2006. However, the 2006 standard lacked enforcement and implementation details, leading to loopholes that prevented effective implementation, and heat conditions got so bad the United Farm Workers (UFW) sued Cal/OSHA in 2012 alleging that the 2006 standard was not being enforced, according to Barbarash.

With UFW members facing harm from heat illness in the fields and packing houses of California, in 2015-2016 Cal/OSHA revised their heat standard to be specific, she said. Cal/OSHA strengthened worker-heat-protections by mandating specific requirements from employers, including worker rest breaks in shaded areas without risk of retaliation; free, clean, accessible, cool drinking water; effective training for workers and supervisors alike to recognize signs of heat illness, and how to respond; monitoring of environmental conditions and personal health; reliable communication for first aid and emergency response and formal written heat illness protection plans.

The 2015-2016 Cal/OSHA rule included enforcement capacity in addition to specific employer requirements, and that led to improved outcomes and decreased worker fatalities in California, Barbarash said.

Click here to view any of the hearings.