Can President Biden Protect Workers from the Heat?

By Willy Blackmore | Word In Black (WIB) – With another scorching summer on the horizon — and states either trying and failing to pass heat protections for workers or outright banning them — the Biden Administration is reportedly looking to establish federal rules to protect people from extreme temperatures at both outdoor and indoor jobs.  According to The New York Times, a proposed change to Occupational Safety and Health Act rules could help keep up to 50 million workers  — many of whom are Black and Latinx —.safer on the job. Those two demographic groups comprise 45 percent of the outdoor workforce in particular, while the boom in warehouse jobs and other indoor logistics positions for online retailers like Amazon have hired heavily from Black communities. According to its own data, more than  a quarter of Amazon’s overall workforce in 2022 was Black, for example, yet just shy of 9 percent of its white-collar workforce  the same year was Black.  Not only are Black and Latinx people overrepresented in jobs where heat is a growing workplace risk; they are also statistically more likely to suffer& both heat-related illness and deaths. So it’s fair to say that new federal heat...