Lawmakers’ summer recess begins with no new heat standard protection for N.J. workers

Days after a record-breaking heat wave in New Jersey, the Legislature recessed for the summer without moving legislation that would mandate protections for workers who spend hours outdoors in the blistering heat. 

Sen. Joe Cryan (D-Union), who has sponsored a version of the measure since 2023, said he’s aggravated at the uphill battle this controversial bill has faced when he believes it’s “common sense.” 

“Everybody knows that we just had two of the hottest days in years. We look at people working outside while we drive and say, ‘Wow, look at that, that’s something I don’t want to be doing.’ But yet, we don’t care enough to provide the standards that they need and deserve,” Cryan said. 

His latest proposal would require employers to develop heat-related illness and injury prevention plans, and mandate the state labor commissioner to create heat stress levels that trigger those plans. Employers would be required to regularly monitor workers for exposure to heat, provide cool water, cool-down areas and paid rest breaks, limit the time employees are out in the heat during the workday, postpone non-essential tasks, and limit exposure to work in sources of heat. 

Prevention plans also would have to include annual training for employees working in the heat, along with record-keeping requirements and emergency response procedures, according to the bill. The Labor Department could issue stop-work orders for employers who don’t comply with the bill’s provisions, and fine businesses $2,000 for each day they violate the stop-work order.   

The bill, introduced in November, has not been scheduled for a hearing in the Senate. The Assembly’s companion bill also awaits a hearing in that chamber’s appropriations committee.

After another year of the legislation languishing, Cryan is mulling introducing yet another version, in hopes of garnering more support from business groups who have vehemently opposed the legislation. Provisions in previous bills he considered straightforward have become an odyssey, he said, with critics targeting the temperature of water or shade requirements.  

The New Jersey Business and Industry Association has testified against several iterations of the bill, saying the requirements would be onerous to businesses that already maintain effective work safety plans. 

“Our members have found that it would be extraordinarily difficult for them to comply with this legislation given its sheer impracticality, vagueness, costs, and industrial workplace-oriented standards that do not fit the needs of all businesses and clearly makes New Jersey an outlier regarding this new overly burdensome mandate,” Elissa Frank, the association’s vice president of government affairs, told the Assembly Labor Committee during a February hearing. 

As lawmakers stall, Garrett O’Connor of Make the Road New Jersey, an immigrant labor advocacy group, noted that a federal agency recently confirmed the heat-related death of a New Jersey worker last summer. 

“Advocates for a workplace heat standard had said that over and over again, had made it clear, that a delay in getting workers protected would be deadly, and that’s exactly what we saw,” O’Connor said. 

According to an OSHA report, the 49-year-old worker was pouring concrete in Madison on July 8, 2024, when he began to “experience symptoms of heat stress and exhaustion due to high environmental temperatures” and collapsed. The National Weather Service had issued a heat advisory that day, with temperatures up to 97 degrees forecasted. 

He was taken to a local hospital, where he died, according to the OSHA report.

The employer was fined $5,000 following an “informal settlement.” The citation states that employees were exposed to “high ambient heat” and “aggravating factors including an estimated moderate workload level.”

In 2022, three Amazon employees died at warehouses across the state — with at least one death occurred during a heat wave. The company denied heat played a role in their deaths.

As many as 170,000 workers fall victim to heat-stress incidents nationwide annually, according to consumer advocacy group Public Citizen. Lower-wage workers are five times more likely to face heat-related injuries, and farmworkers face up to 35 times higher risk of dying from heat exposure than the rest of the U.S. workforce, the group said in a 2023 study.

O’Connor hopes that OSHA’s determination that heat contributed to last year’s death of the worker in Madison will move legislators to act on Cryan’s bill after they return to Trenton in the fall.

States like California, Oregon, Washington and Minnesota have passed laws to protect workers from extreme heat, O’Connor pointed out. 

“There’s been this big misunderstanding with legislators that the sky is falling, but those predictions from opponents have not proven to be true elsewhere,” he said.