On July 21st, the House Education and Workforce Committee voted 18-15 to pass a bill that would ban OSHA from finalizing a federal heat safety standard. The proposed rule — the one they killed — would have required employers to provide water and a cool place to rest when it hits 80 degrees. Water. Shade. That’s the government overreach they gutted. The same month, a heat wave had already killed dozens of people across the country.
Rep. Mark Messmer from Indiana sponsored it. Committee chair Tim Walberg from Michigan backed it. They called a water-and-shade requirement “one-size-fits-all,” which is a wild way to describe not letting your roofers collapse. Around 48 workers die from heat on the job every year and that’s almost certainly undercounted because most states don’t require employers to report heat as a cause of death. The committee saw those numbers and decided the real problem was too much paperwork.
This is what you get when the people writing labor law have air conditioning built into every room they’ll ever sit in. They vote against a mandatory water break for someone pouring concrete in July and go home to a thermostat set to 72. The word for that isn’t deregulation. It’s contempt.