President Donald Trump’s nominee to head the nation’s workplace safety agency is a former safety executive for companies that were repeatedly cited by the same agency for worker illnesses and deaths amid extreme heat, according to federal records reviewed by the Lever.
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Workplace safety advocates have long been sounding the alarm on the dangers of extreme heat.
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“People have known this is a problem for a very long time,” said Anastasia Christman, a senior policy analyst at the National Employment Law Project. “Clearly, it’s becoming more of a problem as many parts of the country experience heat for longer periods of time.”
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The early signs of the second Trump administration’s approach to workplace safety don’t look promising for workers, said Christman at the National Employment Law Project.
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“Trump’s track record on this is not great,” Christman said. “The first Trump administration didn’t advance any new protections, and the agency was significantly underfunded, so enforcing the ones that were on the books was very difficult.”
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Business groups that have fought against heat protection rules have used “every argument in their arsenal,” Christman said.
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Christman worries that without a federal standard, decentralized efforts to develop state or local heat standards won’t be enough to protect workers from rising temperatures.
“What keeps me up at night is that a lot of the states that rely entirely on federal rules are not states that would be inclined to look at the federal rule being pulled and think it’s time to do something to protect workers in their states,” Christman said.
“We can try to protect millions of workers in states where there is the legal ability to do so, but there are millions more in states where workers are exposed to heat who don’t have those protections,” Christman said. “How are we going to make sure that those workers aren’t dying needless deaths as summers get hotter?”
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