Worker Heat Safety Laws: A Smoldering Topic in a Cold Spell
Post by Alina Schnake-Mahl, ScD, MPH and Leah Schinasi, MSPH, PhD
As much of the U.S. still has weeks left of below freezing temperatures and ice- and snow-clogged streets, excess heat may be the last thing on anyone’s mind. But heat is the leading weather-related cause of death, and with the 10 warmest years on record having occurred since 2015, winter may be the best time to reignite debates on heat policies.
For many workers, heat is not just inconvenient or uncomfortable, it can be life threatening. In 2023, the most recent data available, there were 55 fatal occupational injuries officially coded as being caused by exposure to environmental heat. But this is almost certainly a massive undercount; heat-related outcomes (injuries, illnesses, and deaths) often manifest and are coded as being associated with other causes, such as cardiovascular disease, even when heat is the underlying cause. In the same year, there were nearly 28,000 workplace injuries attributed to heat. Despite the threat heat poses to health, simple and humane protections – rest, water breaks, and shade – are not guaranteed to American workers laboring in hot temperatures.
The U.S. lacks federal regulation to specifically protect workers from heat, though a notice of proposed rulemaking has been published by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the agency charged with protecting workers. Absent the final rule, seven states have passed heat safety laws covering workers, and 18 states proposed occupational heat safety regulations during the 2025 legislative session. However, even among the seven states with heat safety regulations, population coverage varies; some states cover only indoor workers (Minnesota), others cover only outdoor workers (Washington), another covers only agricultural workers (Colorado), and four states cover both indoor and outdoor workers (Nevada, Oregon, Maryland, California). These state laws require employers to provide various protections to workers laboring in hot conditions.
However, the two hottest states went the opposite direction.
In August 2024, there were 15 days in Dallas that reached temperatures of 100 degrees or above; in Miami, there were only six days that August when temperatures were below 90 degrees. In both places, outdoor workers did not have guaranteed water or rest breaks.
Both states not only failed to pass occupational heat safety regulations, but they also preempted any ability of local government to protect their workers from heat. After Austin and Dallas implemented ordinances requiring 10-minute shade and water breaks for construction workers, the Texas state legislature responded with its aptly nicknamed “Death Star Bill,” which preempted local ordinances that go beyond state law in several extremely broad areas, including occupational policy. Since Texas state law fails to provide any worker heat protection, the Austin and Dallas heat break ordinances were preempted. The following year at least six Texas workers died of heat exposure, though this is almost certainly an undercount.
Then Florida followed suit in 2024. Two million Floridians, or nearly one quarter of the state’s workforce, work outside. Miami-Dade County, which in the prior year broke 15 daily peak temperature records, proposed a heat standard to protect the lives of outdoor workers. But before the ordinance could be implemented, Governor Ron DeSantis and the state legislature passed a law specifically preempting cities or counties from creating heat protections for outdoor workers. While the state argued that the preemption law was intended to avoid a patchwork of local legislation, it failed to propose any statewide legislation, leaving workers in Florida without protection. That summer Miami-Dade had 60 days with a heat index at or above 105 degrees, leaving workers at continued risk of heat injury.
These decisions have health implications. For some workers, heat exposures can have devastating short- and long-term impacts. Indeed, workers in industries such as agriculture, manufacturing, construction, or food service face high risks because their work is physically intensive, and often requires wearing bulky clothing—all while facing intense heat exposures. These workers risk experiencing heat stress and a variety of heat-specific illnesses, including heat stroke, heat exhaustion, and heat-induced fainting. Heat exposure and overheating can lead to a variety of other dangerous symptoms, such as dizziness, impaired brain functioning, muscle cramps, nausea, headache, cardiovascular or respiratory events, and acute kidney injury. Some of these symptoms can lead to debilitating injury, and in tragic cases, death. All of these heat-related responses are preventable, however.
Despite the current administration’s deregulatory agenda, the OSHA regulation, which mandates water, paid breaks, shade/cool areas and acclimatization for new workers, beginning at 80 degrees, appears to be moving forward. But even in the most optimistic of scenarios, the regulation is multiple years away. In the meantime, and even if the OSHA regulation goes into effect, states and local government have an important role to play in protecting workers from heat. States can use the Overton Window opened by one extreme weather event to prompt action on another (or to combine with policies protecting workers from the cold, an approach several states have recently proposed).
State and local government can consider various heat protection policies, allowing for researchers to test approaches to determine what to include and how to best implement these policies to spread awareness and facilitate compliance to protect workers. For example, our own analysis suggested that after Dallas’s water break ordinance went into effect (before it was preempted) occupational injuries declined slightly. But Dallas’s law was limited. It only required employers to provide workers with 10-minute rest breaks, for every four hours worked. When compared with the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health’s (NIOSH) recommendations for worker heat safety, the requirements of this law—while better than nothing—were far from sufficient. More comprehensive heat legislation is likely necessary to provide full protection for workers laboring in hot environments. And, given varying levels of local acclimatization, differences in climate, and even in workplace setting, local tailoring may be necessary, emphasizing the importance of allowing local variation in policies either by setting baseline state polices and allowing local government to do more (floor preemption) or at the very least avoiding preempting local action. In preempted states, localities may need to get creative; for example, Miami-Dade County implemented a “heat season protocol” that includes a heat education campaign, heat and hydration grants for small businesses, and a heat warning system. This non-legislative approach may be promising where legislative action is prohibited by state law.
There are key gaps in research that impede current activity, and that could support advocates’ efforts to advance heat safety regulations. These include:
Research to understand safe maximum temperature and humidity thresholds for workers and development of safe protective equipment and clothing for workers that supports occupational safety, even when it is hot outside;
Research that quantifies the long-term (chronic) health impacts of workplace heat exposure;
Partnerships between advocates and researchers to understand the full scope of heat-related sickness and deaths, including who’s most impacted, and dissemination of these findings to policy makers;
Research to understand which existing heat policies have reduced heat injury most, and sharing of best practices to other jurisdictions; and
Continued critical reporting to document the stories of workers whose lives were cut short due to extreme heat in the workplace.
The past three summers have been the hottest on record. And projections suggest our summers will continue to get hotter. So, while hats and gloves may be top of mind today, action is needed in states and cities before the heat descends. Many of the state lawmakers pushing these abusive preemption measures or neglecting to pass heat protection policies aren't in session during the hottest months of the year, and when they do work, it's under the constant hum of air conditioning. But many workers in their states aren't as lucky.
Alina Schnake-Mahl, ScD, MPH, is an assistant professor in the Urban Health Collaborative and Department of Health Management and Policy at the Dornsife School of Public Health at Drexel University. She also serves as part of the 2025 Research Cohort for the Local Solutions Support Center.
Leah Schinasi, MSPH, PhD, is an environmental epidemiologist and Assistant Professor of Environmental and Occupational Health, also at the Dornsife School of Public Health. Much of her current work focuses on elucidating structural solutions to climate vulnerability.