As part of an ongoing White House initiative to make sure everyone in the federal government pulls together to support the impression that President Biden is awake and in charge, OSHA recently re-announced its already existing heat standard.
This happened at the end of July when President Biden took the opportunity make Americans recognize that it is hot in summer due to global warming, and he was unleashing the awesome powers of the federal government against the sun.
Leaving aside comparisons of Biden to King Canute (invariably unfair because that unhappy monarch has been mistakenly maligned in the retelling of his story), employers should be aware that OSHA is preparing to issue a new heat-related regulation in a rulemaking proceeding it launched in 2021.
In the agency’s ongoing campaign to support unionization of Amazon, OSHA has gone out of its way to back the organizers’ depiction the management of the ecommerce behemoth as seeking to injure and sicken its workers, despite largely successful efforts in recent years to improve its safety record.
Warehouse operators should remain aware that the agency launched a National Emphasis Program this year targeting the industry for intensive inspections.
If you manage a nonunion operation, you would do well to study and apply OSHA’s specific recommendations regarding the prevention of heat illness and where you will learn, along with some genuinely helpful advice, that “environmental heat is produced by warm or hot surroundings.”
In all seriousness, if you follow the agency’s guidelines you will not only go a long way to avoiding OSHA violations when the inspectors show up, but you also will be ensuring that your warehouse workforce is protected from the very real threat of heat illness in your facilities.
