Hot Take: Heat Protection Shouldn't Burn Businesses

As summer temperatures continue to rise, there’s no better time to talk about what ACD members can expect this summer and what precautions businesses can take to protect workers from extreme temperatures.

Amid these heat waves, some key recommendations include ensuring teams are taking regular breaks, encouraging hydration, and helping workers slowly acclimate to warm weather or areas where temperatures are higher than usual. These are all components of a thorough plan to make sure your workers are safe from extreme temperatures.

To help guide these safety recommendations, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has made various resources available to employers and established a National Emphasis Program addressing heat-related workplace hazards through its General Duty Clause. Also, in August 2024, in addition to the general duty clause, OSHA proposed a new heat illness rule, which would establish a new standard focusing on dangers related to heat in the workplace. While ACD and its members recognize risks associated with extreme heat and acknowledge an employer’s responsibility to protect employees, we are concerned that the proposed standard is overly broad and would impose administrative burdens on small businesses while complicating existing processes for workers.

During our Washington Fly-In in May, ACD spoke to Members of Congress expressing these concerns, and at the end of June, ACD member Brett Mears, President of Palmer Logistics, testified before OSHA about the overly prescriptive proposed rulemaking.

These conversations centered around the proposal’s three main flaws:

1. The low heat threshold is especially burdensome, requiring employers to incorporate the rule’s provisions for the majority of the year in hotter regions rather than periods during which heat reaches regionally high levels.
2. The one-size-fits-all approach makes no distinction between industries. Low-risk industries, like traditional warehouse employers, and high-risk industries, like roofing companies that require their employees to perform strenuous manual labor in direct sunlight, would be subject to the same regulatory requirements.
3. The mandated, rigid provisions would pose significant compliance challenges for employers and interfere with worker autonomy while duplicating existing OSHA regulations under the General Duty Clause.

Our team is closely monitoring developments related to this proposal and is taking proactive steps to inform the administration about the potential damage this rulemaking would cause to our industry if finalized as proposed.

The testimony can be found here.