Working in the Heat: The US Chamber of Commerce Wants Bosses to Decide If You Live or Die

It is hard to imagine a more immoral position

Photo by Norbert Tóth on Unsplash

I am appalled at the US Chamber of Commerce. What kind of institution promotes that a boss can make life-or-death decisions over his or her employees? While OSHA is trying to create regulations to protect employees from heat-related death and injury, the chamber is objecting in yet another disgusting effort to confuse, complicate, and obfuscate the issue. AS CNN reports:

Business interests, including the US Chamber of Commerce, are objecting to the rule-making proposal, saying the question of what heat conditions are safe for workers is a complex question not easily addressed by a set of standards and rules and that differences in exertion and physical condition of workers plays a role in the risk from heat.

One would assume, then, that according to the Chamber and “business interests”, the boss is in a position to assess the exertion levels and the physical condition of workers, as well as assess the risk from heat to those workers… of course, with no other interest in mind other than the worker’s safety (sarcasm intended). This is like the oil industry pretending not to know that climate change is real, or the tobacco industry pretending that the evidence on smoking was not conclusive. Give me a break.

Here's what the chamber is saying: "As business owners, we have the right to work our employees to death." There is precedent for this. Back in the 18^th century, plantation owners regularly worked their slaves to death in the tobacco fields of the Carolinas and Georgia. If some died, they just bought more. It was a simple calculation as a cost of doing business.

Later, in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, employees were dying on the job, pushed by bosses to undertake unsafe workplace risks. Workplace deaths occurred with a frequency that became alarming, and that is what led Congress to establish OSHA in the first place. There is no question that the regulations promulgated and enforced by OSHA have substantially increased workplace safety.

What makes this position by the Chamber so appalling is the obvious impact of climate change-driven heat events. But then again, the Chamber rarely supports climate-friendly policies at all. As an example, the Chamber opposed the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, and it lobbies strongly against climate policies five times more often than it strongly lobbies for them. The Chamber is engaged in denialism here, pretending that the climate crisis doesn’t exist and therefore there is no need to standardize methods of keeping employees safe in the heat.

Extreme heat events today are not quite enough to create mass death for outdoor workers, but they are enough to kill many people—just not everyone. When heat events lead to mass death, the Chamber’s denialism will be put into the open for everyone to see the immorality that it truly is. Until then, the Chamber and similar groups can argue that it wasn’t the heat, it was a pre-existing condition. It wasn’t the heat, it was a person’s fitness level. It wasn’t the heat, it was that the person didn’t take their own appropriate precautions. They don’t want it to be the heat, because if it is the heat, then it is also climate change. Better to live in a bubble of denialism, I guess, than to engage the truth in the world.

How do these people sleep at night? How in the world do they get up in the morning and behold themselves in the mirror? As people are sweating and dying on job sites in heat dome-affected areas because their bosses won't give them a break, people at the Chamber insist this is how things should be. In many ways, they look like Yevgeny Prighozin, the boss of the mercenary army Wagner Group, as he sent waves of men to die in Bakhmut, Ukraine.

Surely, there must be some limits to what is acceptable. In the last couple of weeks, places in Iran hit a heat index of 152°F. Note that 160°F is considered the upper limit of human survivability for more than a few hours of exposure without exertion. Back in 2015, Iran hit a heat index of 165°F. At a level like that, one can expect mass death among those who cannot find a place to cool off—you know, like workers who work outdoors.

In the US, we have recently seen heat indexes in the 120°F to 140°F range. Those levels are extreme and considered very dangerous, especially for anyone exerting themselves outside—such as workers. The exertion adds to the risk. Surely, it is not in a business’s interest to see mass death among its workers… or is it? Surely they would agree to some limit—that maybe a heat index of 160°F is too high. No? How about 170°F? Or maybe 180°F, a point beyond which no one can survive? They refuse all limits. For all the talk of human capital and corporate efforts to "value workers," the Chamber's position reveals the reality—business doesn’t give a damn.

As a business owner, I find this situation with the Chamber especially appalling because of that last sentence—the appearance that “business doesn’t give a damn.” That’s exactly what it looks like. But you know, a helluva lot of business owners do give a damn. They actually care about their employees. They want their people to be safe, healthy, and productive. The Chamber’s position, if it were to hold sway, puts those who want to do the right thing, thereby incurring higher costs, at a disadvantage to those willing to work people to death and go find new people—just like the slave owners of the 18^th century did. It is galling that the US Chamber of Commerce purports to represent “business interests” when they are actually representing corporate interests willing to sacrifice the lives of their employees to make an extra buck.

Anthony Signorelli