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AUTHORSHIP
24 July 2026
Heatwaves highlight decades of federal inaction on preventing workplace heat deaths
Record-breaking heat calls attention to failure of voluntary compliance standards to prevent workplace heat deaths, with farmworkers at particular risk
Attribution: California Dreamin' (Unsplash)
I. Introduction
ISSUE AREAS
LABOR RIGHTS
CLIMATE CHANGE
As the effects of climate change mount, Summer 2026 has seen historic heat waves through much of the country. A large heat dome in late June placed more than 180 million Americans under major or extreme heat risk, with cities including Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. breaking certain heat-related records. Weeks later, a second heat dome emerged in the Western contiguous U.S., leading to record-breaking temperatures in states including Utah and Wyoming. Nationally, heat-related deaths have surged over 50% since the turn of the millennium, and the Trump administration’s EPA’s decision to renege on combatting climate change means the issue is only likely to get worse over time. Extreme heat is considered the single deadliest weather-related health hazard nationwide, and official statistics almost certainly undercount the actual number given poor methodology.
While no one is exempt from health risks posed by extreme heat, working-class Americans, particularly in fields such as construction and agriculture, are at particularly high-risk of injury or death. Research has found that in the year 2023 alone, extreme heat was the cause of some 28,000 workplace injuries nationwide. Farmworkers are widely considered to be the group facing the largest risk of heat-related workplace deaths, dying at 35 times the rate of other workers. In addition to working conditions that require working outside even in deadly temperatures, farmworkers, especially immigrant farmworkers, face arduous working conditions and unusually weak federal protections.
Despite the clear moral and public health necessity of federal workplace heat standards, industry lobbying efforts over the past four decades have prevented progress. As it stands, Republican lawmakers are working to advance legislation to prohibit the Department of Labor from implementing heat safety standards, with a bill advancing in the House Education and Workforce Committee earlier this week. This stands to have a particularly detrimental impact on farmworkers, particularly in conjunction with the Trump administration’s broader rollback of labor and environmental protection laws. Compounding this, the Trump administration's efforts to undermine the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) stand to weaken labor unions, the institutions best-equipped to advocate for workers' safety, including on heat in the workplace, in the absence of federal regulation.
II. Human Toll and Policy Efforts
LACK OF FEDERAL STANDARDS
In 1972, the federal National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) recommended instituting federal occupational standards for heat stress in hot environments. In the 1980s, the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) nonetheless chose to ignore recommendations for workplace heat protections, setting in motion four decades of inaction on an issue that has only become more pertinent given climate change. Since then, many countries have moved to establish nationwide workplace heat standards, including across Europe, a continent now experiencing unusually extreme heat of its own as climate change intensifies.
To this day, the United States has no comprehensive standard for workplace heat safety at the federal level. In 2021, I noted in a report for Data for Progress that the Department of Labor was finally taking steps towards implementing needed safeguards, writing that “the Biden administration took the long-overdue step of ordering OSHA to develop a federal workplace heat standard. The White House announced that OSHA investigators would be deputized to respond to workplace complaints on days where the temperature exceeds 80 degrees Fahrenheit.”
The Biden-era OSHA’s efforts to implement rulemaking on workplace heat standards, ultimately finalized in 2024, would face powerful opposition from corporations and trade organizations. Upon returning to office, the Trump administration halted the rulemaking via regulatory freeze, and in April 2026 removed inspection targets from OSHA's heat enforcement program entirely. In the absence of proactive oversight, voluntary compliance standards were implemented. These standards are insufficient for ensuring that employers who force workers to work in unsafe conditions are held accountable.
Companies like Amazon and UPS have been cited by OSHA for a wide number of heat-related safety violations, in stark contrast to both companies’ claimed commitment to worker safety. It’s worth noting, then, that David Keeling, Trump's choice to lead OSHA, previously worked on behalf of both companies during his time in the private sector. The Revolving Door Project has noted that under Keeling, OSHA has taken several major steps to roll back workers’ protections amid industry pressure, including rules governing ladder safety in the workplace. In general, OSHA’s mission has been undermined in the second Trump administration, with the agency, whose functions have been long challenged by corporate lobbyists, decreasing workplace inspections.
COMPOUNDING IMPACT ON FARMWORKERS
No group bears the cost of this regulatory failure more acutely than farmworkers, who die from heat exposure at 35 times the rate of other workers. With immigrants making up some 68% to 70% of farmworkers, many workers in the sector, including H-2A guest workers, are afraid to report heat-related illness or request time off during periods of extreme heat, fearing they will not be invited back the following season. The human toll of the lack of federal safeguards can be seen in tragic cases such as the death of 30-year-old migrant farmworker José Arturo Gonzalez Mendoza in 2023, who died working in 94-degree heat without adequate access to water and shade. His employer, Barnes Farming, would be fined $187,500 by regulators in North Carolina for his death, though this was reduced to just $3,750, a 98% reduction.
The impact of the Trump administration’s decision to roll back heat protection efforts has a compounding impact on farmworkers alongside other measures to undercut H-2A wages, eliminate data used by regulators to protect them, and undermine wage theft enforcement. For workers on the H-2A agricultural guest worker program, these heat-related death risks come at a time when the Trump administration has worked to undermine them by restructuring the Adverse Effect Wage Rate, the minimum wage floor for H-2A workers. The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) estimates farmworkers stand to lose between $4.4 and $5.4 billion annually as a result of this policy shift. The Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) decision to discontinue the Farm Labor Survey, the data mechanism used to set those wages, was unsurprisingly welcomed by industry groups in the sector. Far from a series of disconnected policies, these are all choices by the Trump administration to undermine the working conditions and bargaining power of H-2A workers at the behest of powerful agricultural sector interests.
Immigrant farmworkers are already harmed by rampant wage theft, an issue that is likely to be further emboldened given the Trump administration’s sabotage of the Department of Labor (DOL). In office, Trump has pushed for the defunding of the DOL Wage and Hour Division (WHD), the agency directly responsible for investigating wage theft. As noted in analysis from Good Jobs First released in December 2025, there was a 94% decrease in wage and hour penalties in the first year of the second Trump administration. A collaborative report by Prism, Futuro Investigates, and Latino USA released in 2023 found that, per the DOL’s own documents, H-2A workers were owed $7 million in unpaid wages as a result of employers’ wage theft over a decade-long period; the money was never ultimately given to those victimized by their employers.
DUELING POLICY EFFORTS
Despite functionally nonexistent heat-related federal workplace protections, congressional Republicans have pushed for legislation to prevent said standards from being enacted in the future. Rep. Mark Messmer's (R-IN) Heat Workforce Standards Act (HR 6213), which would permanently prohibit the Secretary of Labor from finalizing any heat protection standards, passed its initial committee hearing in a party-line 18-15 vote in July 2026. Rep. Greg Casar (D-TX), long an advocate for worker heat protections, strongly criticized the legislation, characterizing its supporters as members of Congress who "get to work indoors" who are blocking protections "basically because industry lobbies are asking for it." The legislation has seen strong opposition from organized labor groups including the AFL-CIO.
The bill has 60 Republican co-sponsors in the House, including eight from Florida, among them Republican gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds. The “Sunshine State”, distinguished by its warm climate, boasts a workforce of over 611,000 outdoor workers concentrated in sectors such as agriculture, landscaping, and construction. The Republican Party-controlled state government notably barred local governments from enacting their own heat safety rules, seen as an effort to preempt Miami-Dade County from implementing workplace safety measures. This followed a similar preemption effort in Texas in 2023, reflecting a trend of Republican-controlled states with powerful agricultural lobbies who have passed laws to prevent municipalities from protecting workers from heat illness.
In the current congressional session, Democrats have countered by reintroducing the proposed Asunción Valdivia Heat Illness, Injury, and Fatality Prevention Act. Reintroduced by Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA) and Rep. Judy Chu (D-CA) in their respective chambers, the legislation is named after a farmworker who died in 2004 after working in 105-degree heat for 10 hours straight, ultimately dying of heat stroke in the process. The legislation would direct OSHA to establish a permanent, enforceable standard for workplace heat safety. This includes requirements that workers be able to access water and paid breaks in cool spaces, limits on heat exposure time, and emergency response procedures in the event of medical distress.
It’s worth noting that California’s heat standard, first enacted in 2005, has been credited with meaningfully reducing heat-related deaths among outdoor workers. Alongside state-level efforts to advance workplace heat safety, it’s promising that many local governments are taking initiative as well. In Arizona, a state where extreme temperatures pose health risks in the workplace and beyond, municipalities including Phoenix and Tempe have passed local laws intended to protect outdoor workers from heat. In June 2026, New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani signed an executive order that requires city agencies to create plans for preventing heat illness, with mandatory measures to provide outdoor workers with relevant safety resources.
III. Conclusion
With extreme weather likely to become more common as a result of climate change, it stands to reason that the cost of continued inaction on workplace heat protections will grow. Far from an issue that exclusively impacts outdoor workers in certain industries, work injuries tied to extreme heat exposure have been documented across sectors and workplace settings, including jobs performed entirely indoors. A May 2026 report from the Groundwork Collaborative found that extending strong heat protections to all American workers could prevent 1,000 to 1,500 deaths per year. Given its scope, protecting workers from heat illness is likely to become a more visible political issue over time. A Data for Progress survey conducted in July 2026 found that 88% of respondents favor proposals to require employers to provide workers with water, shade, and paid breaks during heat waves. Notably, in spite of congressional Republicans currently pushing legislation to effectively prohibit the creation of said standards, this number included 89% of Republicans.
The Trump administration has worked to neutralize the NLRB's functions, beginning with the unprecedented firing of board member Gwynne Wilcox that left the agency without a quorum. The undermining of the board’s power has directly harmed the labor movement, with it being credited with a 30% decline in union elections in 2025. Research has affirmed that unionized workers generally experience better protections from heat illness than non-union workers. In the absence of real federal safeguards, collective bargaining is the most effective tool for workers to protect themselves from dangerous workplace conditions, including heat stress. In addition to helping negotiate formal heat protections into contracts, unions help empower workers to report lawbreaking employers, who may still try to force employees to work in unsafe conditions, without fear of retaliation.
Aidan Smith
Founder, Labyrinth Insights
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