The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has a new enforcement initiative that will target one of the agency’s top priorities after the appearance of COVID-19: indoor and outdoor heat-related workplace hazards.
This National Emphasis Program (NEP) covers 70 “high risk industries,” and it will result in increased inspections and enforcement activity across the targeted industries just in time for spring.
The current administration has made clear it is concerned with the effects of climate change and how that affects America’s workforce. For years, the agency investigated complaints of heat stress and heat illness and investigated hospitalizations and fatalities resulting from heat-related illness in the workplace. These efforts have been mostly reactive. Now, OSHA intends to ramp up outreach and enforcement in an effort to eliminate heat hazards in the work environment with the new proactive initiative.
OSHA has no standard specifically addressing the hazard of heat (although it has published an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking for “Heat Injury and Illness Prevention in Outdoor and Indoor Work Settings” in the Federal Register). It relies on the general duty clause (section 5(a)(1)) of the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 to cite employers. The agency, however, is in the early stages of rulemaking for a heat illness standard, having issued an advanced notice of proposed rulemaking earlier this year to solicit information...
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