36 million workers were to be better protected from heat by a new regulation from OSHA – the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Shade, drinking water, breaks: not luxuries, but the bare minimum a civilized society owes those who keep it running day after day. What President Joe Biden envisioned as the first nationwide protection against extreme heat has, under Donald Trump, turned to dust. In the summer of 2024 – the hottest year on record – the former administration announced a framework that was meant to respond to the escalating climate crisis. A simple idea, almost banal in its logic: if people suffer heat strokes while working, the state must intervene. Breaks, hydration, monitoring – a structure to prevent death in the name of productivity. But with the shift in power in early 2025, the rollback began. And with it, a quiet disappearance of public care.
Donald Trump nominated David Keeling – a man who had previously worked for Amazon and UPS – as the new head of OSHA. Under his responsibility, there were over 300 violations of labor safety standards. More than two million dollars in fines. And multiple heat-related incidents. It’s as if you appointed a gas station owner as fire chief. Keeling has not yet been confirmed. But the political winds have already changed direction. The Republican-dominated House Education and Workforce Committee called the planned heat protection regulation “bureaucratic overreach” in May 2025. A witness speaking for industry interests claimed people in New Mexico consider 80 degrees Fahrenheit “perfect building weather.” And anyway, what works for Texas might not apply to Maine.
But Greg Casar, a Democrat from Texas, answered with a sentence that laid bare the absurdity: “If it’s 90 degrees in Austin or 90 degrees in Maine – 90 degrees is still 90 degrees.” While federal rules are being watered down or scrapped entirely, some states are trying to implement their own standards. California, Oregon, Maryland, Nevada, Washington – they have at least established partial protections. Others, like Florida, are moving in the opposite direction: Governor Ron DeSantis signed a 2024 law that prohibits cities and municipalities from creating their own regulations. A heat protection measure already passed in Miami-Dade was wiped out with the stroke of a pen. “It was basically just Miami,” said DeSantis, “not the rest of the state.” A sentence that sounds like an excuse – or a confession.
Texas also saw the abolition of a municipal right to rest breaks. The nickname for the law: “Death Star.” Ana Gonzalez of the Texas AFL-CIO put it bluntly: “OSHA standards are the absolute minimum. Anyone trying to abolish them just wants their billionaire buddies to make a few more cents.” But Trump’s rollback isn’t limited to heat rules. He has effectively shut down NIOSH – the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. He closed OSHA field offices in multiple states. He handed over parts of OSHA’s sensitive data to the “Department of Government Efficiency” led by Elon Musk. He paused measures targeting carcinogenic silica dust.
What remains is a statistic of pain: Between 5.2 and 7.8 million workers suffer injuries or illnesses every year due to their jobs, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Between 600 and 2,000 people die each year from heat-related causes. And those most affected are the ones already barely visible: migrants, people of color, older workers. 67 percent of workers who died on the job in 2023 were immigrants. More than a third were over 55. “We are facing a national workers’ rights crisis,” says Jennifer Sherer, co-author of the report. “Driven by Trump’s attacks on workplace safety structures – at a time when climate change is dramatically increasing the risks.”
But she also says: The states can act. They don’t have to wait for Washington. Decades of research, functioning pilot programs, and legislative drafts already exist – everything is in place. And while in Washington old rights decay and new nominations advance in the shadows of power, the world outside is burning. A world where death at work is not caused by natural disasters, but by political indifference. The heat is killing. And Donald Trump? He calls it efficiency.
English 
German 
Unmenschlich, es gibt kein anderes Wort dafür.
da sind nun die gewerkschaften gefragt….