The Threat of Extreme Heat

Workplace safety advocates have long been sounding the alarm on the dangers of extreme heat. Fifty years ago, federal health officials first called for federal protections for workers from the threat of rising temperatures. Since then, the risks of extreme temperatures have grown as heat waves spurred by climate change become more frequent, longer-lasting, and more intense; the last ten years have been the hottest on record.

“People have known this is a problem for a very long time,” said Anastasia Christman, a senior policy analyst at the National Employment Law Project. “Clearly, it’s becoming more of a problem as many parts of the country experience heat for longer periods of time.”

Extreme heat is the leading cause of death among all weather-related incidents in the workplace. While the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that forty workers die per year from exposure to environmental heat, that number is likely a drastic undercount because heat-related deaths are often blamed on other workplace accidents or underlying health conditions. Fulcher’s research with Public Citizen estimated that heat exposure could be responsible for between 600 and 2,000 worker fatalities each year, as well as 170,000 work-related injuries — disproportionately affecting people of color and immigrants.

Along with agricultural workers, delivery service providers are among the workers most vulnerable to the dangers of heat, since they’re often forced to drive in sweltering delivery trucks with minimal cooling measures. UPS drivers have previously shared photos of trucks where thermometer readings show temperatures reaching 130 degrees or more.

The International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which represents more than 300,000 UPS drivers, shared a photo of a driver’s request to install a fan in his truck that was denied, with the rejection noting, “It’s a corporate decision.”

“It’s been inhumane from day one,” wrote Arizona-based UPS driver Robert Johnston in a letter to OSHA in 2021, while Keeling was head of safety at UPS. “I have witnessed and suffered firsthand the company’s callous treatment of employees working in the heat.”

Johnston elaborated on his experience in a follow-up letter in 2024: “When I was a Package Driver, I had a thermometer in the cab and package compartment that would hit 140 degrees in early May and stay there until late September. I have had heat sickness on route, and the company refused assistance and threatened discipline when I went to Urgent Care.”

Keeling, who began his career as a package handler for UPS before climbing the corporate ladder to director of global safety compliance in 2011 and then vice president of global health and safety in 2018, has garnered the support of the Teamsters. In a statement on Keeling’s OSHA nomination, the union noted that workers “will continue to benefit from leaders who started in the trades.” (UPS announced on April 29 that it would cut 20,000 delivery jobs due to Trump’s trade policies.)

But under Keeling’s watch from 2018 to 2021, UPS continued to subject its workers to the dangers of extreme heat.

In the last five years, at least five UPS drivers — and at least one under Keeling’s tenure — died amid extreme heat, resulting in over $200,000 worth of fines, according to the Lever’s review of OSHA records and media reports. Three deaths occurred in Texas, where state lawmakers backed by corporate lobbyist groups recently struck down local ordinances to protect workers from extreme heat. In at least one instance, when twenty-four-year-old UPS driver Esteban Chavez Jr was found unresponsive in his truck on a sweltering day in Pasadena, California, in 2022, OSHA did not list heat as a cause of death, instead listing the death as resulting from an “unknown cause.”

The Teamsters union spent years fighting to get the company to install air conditioning in delivery vehicles. The company fought the effort, including during Keeling’s tenure, arguing that air conditioning would be pointless because of the frequent stops that drivers make. Following Keeling’s departure, the company acquiesced, promising in 2023 that all new vehicles would have air conditioning beginning the following year. So far, very few air-conditioned vehicles have made it on the road.

In a written statement to the Lever, a UPS spokesperson said, “The health and safety of our team members is important to us, and we are committed to providing a safe working environment. We have comprehensive training and protocols to support our employees and continuously work to improve these measures.”

The spokesperson added that only one of the five deaths identified by the Lever was listed as heat-related in coroner reports received by the company. But experts say coroners often omit heat-related matters when issuing death certificates.

During Keeling’s subsequent stint as director of global road and transportation safety for Amazon from 2021 to 2023, the company came under fire for worker deaths and injuries amid extreme heat.

At least two Amazon workers in New Jersey died during a heat wave in 2022. Despite later installing new fans and air conditioning, the company denied the deaths were heat-related, and OSHA closed its investigations into the deaths without holding Amazon accountable for any wrongdoing.

Around the time of the deaths, some warehouse workers said they were fired after complaining to management or not meeting productivity requirements.

“Amazon does not reduce the rate and speed of work on very hot days,” an Amazon worker wrote in a comment letter on OSHA’s proposed heat rule, describing working conditions under Keeling’s tenure. “In the summer of 2023, I was one of four who collapsed from heat exposure at [my warehouse]. After recovering, I returned to work because I was afraid I would lose my job.”

While warehouse conditions likely did not fall under Keeling’s direct purview, there are also reports of potential heat-related illnesses and deaths in Amazon’s transportation services, which Keeling oversaw. The corporation may have avoided attention for some of these incidents because it contracts many of its delivery services to thousands of local companies across the country.

For example, shortly after Keeling’s tenure at the company, OSHA investigated the death of a delivery driver for a Texas-based company contracted by Amazon to deliver its packages. The investigator noted that the employee’s truck had reached 105 degrees and did not have air conditioning.

Under Keeling’s watch, OSHA also fined Amazon $145,000 for exposing its workers to ergonomic dangers that led to musculoskeletal disorders and repeated use injuries among workers. A report by the Strategic Organizing Center that examined data from when Keeling was at Amazon found that injuries at the e-commerce giant’s facilities were 70 percent higher than at non-Amazon warehouses, with the company accounting for almost half of all injuries in US warehouses.

A spokesperson for Amazon noted, “We ensure our heat mitigation practices meet or exceed state requirements and federal guidance, and in many ways, go above and beyond to set more stringent standards for our sites.”

Without a federal heat standard rule, the risks of extreme heat fall under OSHA’s “general duty” clause, a catchall for worksite hazards that are not outlined under specific regulations. This makes it much more difficult for regulators to prove heat causes injury or death, in turn letting employers shirk accountability for making employees work in deadly conditions, said Fulcher at Public Citizen.

For example, when United States Postal Service mail couriers were exposed to heat stress in 2020, the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission, an independent agency that adjudicates challenges to OSHA citations, ruled that employers can’t know when heat is “excessive” because there is no actual limit.

“It is very hard for OSHA to adequately hold employers accountable under something so generic,” Fulcher said. “It means that even though OSHA recognizes these problems at a huge number of places, they only end up bringing about a dozen of these heat cases each year, and many cases have been lost because of it.”

Fulcher’s research estimates that up to 50,000 injuries and illnesses could be avoided each year with an effective federal heat standard.

“World-Class Industrial Athletes”

In 2021, the Biden administration ordered OSHA to begin drafting a heat standard rule, receiving the support of more than a hundred lawmakers. While the federal rulemaking process is typically cumbersome and can take up to a decade to complete — thanks to steady pushback from business interests — Biden’s regulators moved unusually fast: last summer, the agency issued a final draft rule, fast-tracking implementation of the rule by 2026.

But under the new administration, which has launched a massive effort to scale back regulations on every swath of the economy, the rule’s future is “totally up in the air,” Fulcher said. “They could put the rule on the shelf and never look at it again, or they can issue a rule, but in all likelihood, the rule will be significantly watered down from what was the initial proposal.”

The early signs of the second Trump administration’s approach to workplace safety don’t look promising for workers, said Christman at the National Employment Law Project. The Department of Health and Human Services announced in March its intentions to virtually eliminate the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, the agency that informs OSHA’s rulemaking decisions through research on work-related injuries and illnesses. In 1972, the institute first sounded the alarm about the risks of extreme heat.

“Trump’s track record on this is not great,” Christman said. “The first Trump administration didn’t advance any new protections, and the agency was significantly underfunded, so enforcing the ones that were on the books was very difficult.”

Meanwhile, Keeling’s former corporate bosses have been exerting significant effort to beat federal and state heat safety rules. Cormac Gilligan, who replaced Keeling as UPS’s top safety executive after Keeling moved to Amazon, wrote to OSHA in January urging the agency to “reconsider its current approach” to its heat standard rule and to “remove prescriptive thresholds.”

“Our drivers and package handlers are world-class industrial athletes,” Gilligan wrote, adding that the company’s safety program “reflects that belief.”

UPS has spent nearly $11 million lobbying the federal agency since it first began the heat-standard rulemaking process in 2021. The company shelled out about $7 million more to meet with lawmakers over legislation that would force OSHA to implement an interim rule as it works to finalize its heat standard, among other matters. That bill has languished in committee since it was introduced in 2021.

As federal heat protections flounder, states are beginning to pick up the slack. Seven states currently have standards to protect workers against extreme heat, while thirteen more states have pending legislation. But Amazon and UPS have met with lawmakers in at least four of those thirteen states to argue their cases, including in states where their workers have died from heat-induced illnesses and injuries.

Intense heat waves in New York have sent a growing number of UPS drivers to the hospital each summer. A state bill to regulate workplace temperatures introduced in 2023 died in committee the following year, after lobbyists for UPS met with lawmakers throughout 2023 and 2024. The bill was reintroduced at the start of this year.

In New Jersey, where several Amazon workers died in 2022 from heat-induced causes, Amazon and UPS have been busy meeting with legislators and Gov. Phil Murphy (D) about a proposed bill that would require employers to implement plans to protect their workers from exposure to heat.

Heat safety legislation in Florida, where eleven workers have died of heat-related causes since 2017, has floundered in each lawmaking session since 2018. Meanwhile, last April, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed into law a bill prohibiting local governments from enacting their own heat protection ordinances. The ban on municipal heat protections was backed by the Florida Chamber of Commerce, a business lobbying group, whose members include UPS and Amazon. The chamber has also reported lobbying activity on legislative efforts to advance statewide heat protections for workers.

In Rhode Island, lobbying reports show lobbyists hired by Amazon also voiced opposition to the state’s proposed heat safety rule.

Business groups that have fought against heat protection rules have used “every argument in their arsenal,” Christman said. The National Federation of Independent Business, an advocacy group that lobbies on behalf of hundreds of independent businesses across the country, urged New Jersey to table its proposed rule and let the federal government establish a standard. But in the group’s response to OSHA’s draft rule, lobbyists argued against any rule at all, stating that “not every misfortune in society calls for burdensome federal government regulation.”

Christman worries that without a federal standard, decentralized efforts to develop state or local heat standards won’t be enough to protect workers from rising temperatures.

“What keeps me up at night is that a lot of the states that rely entirely on federal rules are not states that would be inclined to look at the federal rule being pulled and think it’s time to do something to protect workers in their states,” Christman said.

“We can try to protect millions of workers in states where there is the legal ability to do so, but there are millions more in states where workers are exposed to heat who don’t have those protections,” Christman said. “How are we going to make sure that those workers aren’t dying needless deaths as summers get hotter?”