Trump’s Going to Weaken Outdoor Workers’ Heat Protections

The “one size” in this instance is temperature. Under the rule, when the mercury rises above 80 degrees, employers are required to offer workers drinking water and rest breaks, and when it rises above 90 degrees employers are required to monitor workers for signs of heat illness and to impose mandatory rest breaks. The counterargument, made at a House hearing last month by Felicia Watson, a senior counsel at the management-side law firm Littler Mendelson, was this: “I’ve talked to employers in New Mexico that say 80 degrees is a great day to build, it’s perfect weather, and you might have something completely different in Florida.”

I’m not surprised to hear employers say that because they aren’t the ones working in outdoor heat. If any metric is uniform across the country, surely it’s the Fahrenheit scale. The human body’s ability to endure its upper registers varies from person to person, but not from region to region. Granted, humid regions can make 90 degrees more unpleasant, but a dry 90 degrees is no picnic either. And anyway, Florida and Texas, two of the “most persistently humid states,” according to The Washington Post, have both passed laws preventing local governments from imposing heat regulations on outdoor work.

I’m going to surprise you now by saying that government regulation of heat exposure is a poor substitute for private enterprise. But before Ms. Milito recruits me for the NFIB, let me explain that the private-sector activity I have in mind is union organizing. Unionization is the single free-market activity opposed by every free-market blowhard. Indeed, the business lobby hates unions considerably more than it hates government. But that’s what outdoor workers need: the protection afforded by collective bargaining.

Roughly one-third of all workers are exposed regularly to outdoor conditions: highway maintenance workers, roofers, crossing guards, mail carriers, construction workers, and so on. Mail carriers, who are unionized, enjoy some protections. But most outdoor workers don’t have a union. Even the construction industry has gone scab: 90 percent of construction workers these days are nonunion. Workers are more dependent on OSHA than they should be, for protection from heat exposure and from other safety hazards, because only 6 percent of all American workers in the private sector, indoors or out, have a union to protect them.