U.S. Representative Greg Casar discusses the timing and impact of a new federal workplace heat safety rule.
For more than a decade, Democratic U.S. Representative Greg Casar, an ex-Austin City Council member now representing a House district that stretches down to San Antonio, has been fighting to protect workers from extreme heat. From 2011 to 2022, the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that 479 workers in the United States died from heat exposure while nearly 34,000 suffered heat-related illnesses or injuries while on the job.
Usually, these rules take seven or eight years to get written and to go into effect, giving big corporate lobbyists plenty of time to kill them before then. But with President Biden turning out to be such a labor-friendly president, with the head of the Department of Labor, Julie Su, leading the charge, and thanks to years of advocacy from people, especially folks in Texas, we’re on an accelerated timeline. passed out from heat exhaustion while driving, and crashed.
Last month, we asked USPS privately to implement the heat protections and the heat rule on their own, which postmaster Louis DeJoy could do with the stroke of his pen. They are a separately controlled agency with its own separate board, so it’s really up to the postmaster general to do the right thing here. And what we heard back from USPS is that they didn’t want to provide those heat protections to their workers.
You’ve spent more than a decade on this issue; what’s the next big worker safety issue on your agenda?
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