It’s been a long time coming. It’s been called for since the early days of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. It still has a long way to go.
Workers have long known the hazards of working hard for long hours every day in the heat. Their masters knew too which is why they had “overseers” to watch the workers and make them work harder and longer if they felt the worker wasn’t working hard enough. Or if they wanted to make an example of someone. Now days we call them employers and managers/foremen.
Workers also know that there are two sides to “heat” and they are cold working conditions and hot working conditions. Currently OSHA‘s proposed Heat Standard only covers hot working conditions. While we are experiencing rampant global climate change which is creating increasingly hotter conditions there are multitudes of workers that must work in cold conditions.There are also many workers that go between hot and cold conditions during the same shift.
WisCOSH feels it is important to include cold working conditions in this proposed Standard as workers cannot wait years or decades to get another Standard enacted for such cold working conditions. WisCOSH encourages you to contact your elected representatives in Washington D.C. and tell them you want OSHA to add cold working conditions and variable temperature working conditions added to their proposal.