If Arizona creates statewide heat protections for workers, enforcement will be the key

We all know that Arizona is hot. Too hot, oftentimes, for workers to safely spend long periods working outdoors — or even indoors where there’s not good air conditioning or air flow.

But, Arizona has no laws to protect workers in the heat. There are city ordinances and the governor formed a task force that’s working with the Arizona Division of Occupational Safety and Health, or OSHA, to come up with heat guidelines for employers. The results of that are expected by the end of the year, which is fast approaching. But, there are no statewide laws.

Monica Sandschafer is the Arizona State Director of Mi Familia en Acción, a Latino civic engagement organization and is pushing the governor to make them.

They are part of the Arizona Heat Standards Coalition, which delivered a petition to the governor recently calling for enforceable heat standards so that employers who don’t follow them can be held accountable.

The rub here will be requiring enforcement. The Show spoke with Sandschafer more about it.

The Show also reached out to the Governor's Office about their response to these efforts. They declined to come on The Show.

Full conversation

MONICA SANDSCHAFER: We are the state where we have the most extreme and dangerous heat season in the country. And we do not have a legal requirement that employers provide basic lifesaving protections like water, shade or rest. Right now what we have is that employers can only be cited if workers are already at risk of death or serious harm.

And as you can imagine, by then it's often too late. What we need is preventative standards that lay out very clearly for employers how they are expected to protect their employees and for employees; what they have a right to in order to continue to be healthy, safe and productive on the job.

LAUREN GILGER: OK. So that's kind of what is outlined in this letter to Gov. Katie Hobbs asking for the Arizona Department of Occupational Safety and Health, OSHA, to kind of create these enforceable — and I think that might be the key word — heat, injury and prevention rules.

Who would these impact most? What types of jobs? What types of workers?

SANDSCHAFER: Yeah, and you're absolutely right that the enforceable part is the key. We know that when we just ask folks to please do something, sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. And you're always going to have high-road employers that are going to take care of their employees. But what we want to do is set a floor so that all employers know what the standard is and are held accountable to that same standard.

Right now, we have nearly half a million Arizonans that are working in heat vulnerable jobs. We've all seen these folks, right? It's the landscapers, it's construction, it's roofers, it's farmworkers, it's a lot of folks outside. The other thing that we've learned through this process is that it's also folks working inside but without air conditioning or proper airflow.

Latino families are the ones that are hit the hardest. So across the country, Latinos are three times more likely to die from heat on the job than non-Latinos. So airport workers, right, the airport workers that come in and clean the planes, they turn off air conditioning on the planes once they land, but the workers have to go in and clean in that heat.

So it's even industries that you wouldn't necessarily immediately think of that need this kind of protection. And that's why a universal enforceable standard is what we need, so that every industry is thinking about this ahead of time so that they can protect their workers, and they're held accountable to that standard.

GILGER: The interesting thing to me there is that when you're outlining the kind of industries impacted, the workers impacted by heat mostly, like a lot of these jobs are going to be probably self-employed. Like, I mean, I wonder how you make it enforceable for a lot of these people who might, you know, not work for a big company, for example.

SANDSCHAFER: Yeah, there are a lot of contractors, and I think that does put folks sometimes at risk. However, what we see is that a lot of these are subcontractors who do have their own employees, right? And so what we want to see is employers from every level, small employers to the largest employers, being held to the same standard.

Because no matter who you work for, you should have the legal right to water, shade, rest on the hottest days in the country.

GILGER: So the governor did issue an executive order related to workers and heat earlier this year, in May, kind of detailing what Arizona currently does and risk mitigation future plans. Was that not enough? Or what would you like to see the governor do that's more?

SANDSCHAFER: That's a great question. So the task force, setting up this task force was a great first step. What's happening — what I've heard from my colleagues, colleagues who are on the task force is that a majority of the folks on the governor's task force want to see an enforceable standard for heat protections across all workplaces.

However, that recommendation is not currently going to ADOSH. The recommendations or the guidelines for the employers are going, but not a plan for implementation or enforcement. So what we want to see now is ADOSH couple those recommendations with a plan to actually hold folks to the standard, right. Otherwise it's just words on paper.

GILGER: Can this come straight from the Governor's Office or is this something that would need legislative action?

SANDSCHAFER: This does not need legislative action. It can come straight through the rulemaking process on the executive side. So that's what we're urging ADOSH to do, is to start the formal rulemaking process as soon as possible in 2026, so that we can get public comment. We know there's a lot of public support for this. And so the rule can be in place by the time the heat starts up again in a few short months.

There's an urgency here to protect lives and to protect folks from heat-related injury and illness. And so we need things to move quickly.

GILGER: There is a heat safety task force the governor put together, and it's set to deliver recommendations by the end of the year here. Have you spoken with them, worked with them? Like I'm guessing they're probably looking at a lot of the same issues that you are.

SANDSCHAFER: That's right. And so we have some colleagues that are on the task force and what they've told us is the majority of task force members do agree that ADOSH should implement an enforceable heat standard with water, rest, shade training — all of those kinds of things. What we're asking ADOSH now to do is to actually couple those recommendations with an implementation and enforcement plan.

So they are looking at exactly the same thing. They're expressing the same amounts of concerns. Now, the question is, what are we going to do about it?

GILGER: Are there federal standards already in place, Monica?

SANDSCHAFER: So there are federal standards that are being discussed, but they're in limbo right now. And really, when you think about it, extreme heat is an Arizona problem, right? This is a very place-based problem that we are very familiar with. The hottest summers on record, the four hottest summers on record have been within the last five years. We want to see an Arizona-specific standard to address this to protect Arizonans.

GILGER: Where's the opposition? Like employers might not want, you know, to be able to be cited, fined, etc. for this.

SANDSCHAFER: That's right. Nobody likes to get a ticket. Nobody likes to get fined. But what we know is that that's what holds people accountable to the same standard, right. That's how you create a level playing field for all employers. As if everybody has the same standard and everybody is held accountable to it.

GILGER: I'm guessing employers might say, you know, "You can trust us to do this. We want our workers to be healthy and not sick and do the job and be able to continue doing it." Right?

SANDSCHAFER: Exactly. And we do think the majority of employers, of course, care about their employees and want to keep them safe, healthy and productive. What we also know is that workplace heat standards, the enforcement of workplace heat standards works. So in California, for example, they implemented an outdoor heat standard. It reduced workplace heat-related deaths by 33%.

So it's not that employers weren't already caring about their employees. It might be that they didn't simply understand the ramifications of the heat or what they needed to provide in order to prevent that, right. Right now we have twice as many heat-related worker comp claims than some of the states around us, including Nevada, which has areas that got as hot as Phoenix does.

And it's because we don't have a preventative standard that protects folks before something happens.