The Department of Labor is proposing a new set of standards for workers that are expected to protect roughly 36 million indoor and outdoor workers from extreme heat.
Fred Yamashita leads Arizona's chapter of the AFL-CIO, the largest federation of unions in the country.
“I think it may not really reach far enough in regards to protecting workers,” said Yamashita, “but I think it provides the most basic of needs.”
Yamashita described the Biden administration as being more worker-friendly than others in the past.
Still, he said, “there was no real input from advocates for working people in some of this process, which I think is a huge misgiving.”
FEMA also recently announced an investment in hundreds of projects, some of them to combat extreme heat.
Yamashita said those investments are important, but further action is needed. For example, expanding the definition of ‘major disaster’ to include extreme heat and wildfire smoke, which pose huge risks to workers’ health and safety.
