You can’t accuse the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration of springing a surprise on employers with its proposed heat safety rule. Preliminary ideas for such a rule have been previewed by the agency for years. The question, now that the rule has been formally presented and published, is what effect it will have on workers, the problems it will entail for employers—even those who are already in step with heat safety protection—and whether all the effort will be put on hold or made moot by legal challenges following the recent U.S. Supreme Court Loper ruling on regulations (see story, p. 8), or the potential of a new administration taking charge.

Luckily, ENR has already had more than a few seasons of writing about safety rulemaking, starting with its veteran Washington Bureau staff, led by Tom Ichniowski. In the summer of 2018, he wrote about a coalition of groups and individuals who petitioned OSHA to create the first nationwide heat safety standard, including a provision to stop work when temperatures are excessive. In 2021, with a new administration in Washington, D.C., Online Editor James Leggate weighed in with a story about OSHA’s advanced notice of proposed rulemaking to develop a standard and OSHA’s launching of an enforcement initiative on heat-related illnesses and deaths. That was the first time the heat index threshold of 80° F, a feature of the current proposed rule, appeared in ENR.

More recently, our Washington, D.C.-based senior editor, Pam McFarland, wrote about OSHA’s just-published final proposed current heat safety rule, including its important section on the possibilities of a new administration dropping it or of legal challenges. You can read about it on p. 17. Other members of ENR’s staff also have joined in the discussions. Senior Editor Emell Adolphus and ENR Southeast Editor Derek Lacey recently talked about heat safety with David Dickson, safety director of consultant Dewberry. Listen to it here.

Whatever happens, the long federal rulemaking process—as well as lobbying, debate and legal battles on state and local levels also—are opportunities to explore in detail what needs to be done to protect workers that can be reasonably asked of employers. We want to know what you think about the OSHA rule and about U.S. heat protection issues in general.