New legislation has been introduced in Congress designed to discard a workplace heat standard initiative introduced during the Biden Administration.
In presenting the Heat Workforce Standards Act of 2025, Indiana Republican Representative Mark Messmer said his goal is to empower employers to “maintain safe and realistic workplace standard parameters which allow for both their workers and the business to thrive.”
Messmer said that an effort first proposed by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration towards the end of the Biden presidency called the “Heat Injury and Illness Prevention in Outdoor and Indoor Work Settings” was too heavy on the regulation side.
A press release issued from Messmer’s office described the Biden proposal as one that “would have forced nearly every American business and institution to follow rigid, one-size-fits-all, federal workplace standards based on predetermined temperature thresholds, regardless of industry, climate, or existing safety protocols.”
The Messmer bill has won the support of the American Building Materials Alliance and the Mason Contractors Association of America, among other industry groups.
In a statement, the National Association of Home Builders on November 21 remarked that the Biden-era proposal would have required a “degree of operational regularity not present on dynamic construction jobsites, and a uniformity of management control not compatible with the construction subcontracting model.”
The greatest industry complaint concerning the Biden heat effort, besides its threat of fines should the new rules not be complied with, was that it did not take into consideration heat variables from location to location.
Critics of the proposal argued that the intensity of the heat may be different in Michigan than it is in Texas, and that what works in agriculture may not work in construction.
Ultimately, charges Messmer, the earlier proposed Biden rule was about “expanding federal bureaucratic control over hard working Americans.”
Prospects for the ultimate passage of the Messmer legislation are currently uncertain.
At the time that the Biden-era proposal was originally aired, legal analysts predicted that if it became a law, it would almost certainly be challenged in court due to its complexity.
November 24, 2025
By Garry Boulard
Image courtesy of Unsplash
