It does not take much for Telitha Solis to feel like she is suffocating. The airplane she’s in has been sitting on the tarmac for hours and has had little to no ventilation. The air-conditioning was turned off long ago, when the last of the passengers exited the plane the night before, and the airliner has heated up like a tin can on asphalt. 

Even at dawn, every movement the 57-year-old makes to clean the plane—moving cushions, checking seat pockets, scrubbing the restroom—spikes her own temperature. 

“I feel like I can’t really move, like I don’t want to move,” she said. “Then I see my co-workers too, they are hot, sweaty, looking like they’re about to throw-up and all that. I get so worried for them.” 

Solis has cleaned planes at George Bush Intercontinental Airport for the past decade – a brutally hot job for about eight months of the year in Houston. As the temperature rises, Solis says she and her colleagues pass out from heat, vomit and get heat stroke. Breaks are short. Water is unreliable. And Solis knows she’s not the only one. 

Thousands of workers in Houston work in dangerously high temperatures. Every year, indoor and outdoor workers across the nation die from heat exposure in unregulated work environments. Between 2011 and 2021, there were 436 work-related deaths due to the heat in the nation, according to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, and experts are concerned the number will continue to increase due to rising temperatures caused by climate change. 

However, workers like Solis may find some reprieve as soon as next year, when the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, expects to implement a new rule to hold employers accountable for workplace heat hazards. The new standard would require employers in all industries to create a plan to regulate climate to protect their workers from heat-related injuries or deaths. 

As part of the implementation process, OSHA is urging workers to submit comments online if they want specific suggestions to the rule, such as water breaks, air-conditioning or medical assistance. These suggestions will inform OSHA on what to add to the final version and if they need to make any changes to the official rule. Interested parties have until December 30, 2024 to submit and can send in their comments here at the Federal Register. 

This new proposed federal rule comes after the Texas legislature passed House Bill 2127 last year limiting  the regulatory authority of local  governments, including the approval of ordinances that require water breaks for workers. Unless the legislature passes a new bill next year to protect workers, advocates in Texas believe the new OSHA rule is the fastest way forward for worker heat protection. 

To Solis, the rule is essential for her and her colleagues. She’s in charge of a cleaning unit that every day, from 5:45 a.m. to 1:45 p.m., sanitizes planes before they take off again. In one day, she and her colleagues will clean about 15 planes – and to accomplish this, they have to walk on the hot tarmac between aircrafts with exhaust increasing temperatures by 10 to 15 degrees. 

She plans to submit comments to OSHA asking for fresh water, cold water and more breaks. She says it  could make a world of difference for her team. 

“I’ve asked for all this before, but I kept being denied by management,” she said. “I just want us to be respected at our job.” 

A federal heat rule

Texas advocates have been asking for worker heat protections since the 1970s, but for years the process has been delayed or stalled by different administrations. It wasn’t until about four years ago that federal officials started to seriously discuss heat safety standards, said David Chincanchan, the policy director for the nonprofit Workers Defense Project. 

“It had been years since OSHA said they were considering a heat rule,” Chincanchan said. “There hadn’t been a lot of updates or progress that we could see, so it was clear officials needed to accelerate the process.” 

OSHA launched its process for new heat regulations in 2021 through an “advanced rule-making notice period.” The agency initially asked for and received public comments to better understand the issue of heat safety, and then OSHA’s National Advisory Council considered specifics for the plan in 2023.

At the same time, Texas officials were ramping up the fight for heat protections. After the State Legislature passed HB 2127 in 2023, Austin Rep. Greg Casar led a thirst strike at the steps of the U.S. Capital to bring awareness to workers and heat. He then sent a letter to the Biden-Harris Administration urging a new OSHA rule with signatures of over 110 U.S. senators and U.S. representatives, including Congresswomen Sylvia Garcia and the late Sheila Jackson Lee. 

Garcia, who represents the Houston Metro area,  also proposed the Construction Injury Prevention Act that year asking for a required 15-minute work break every four hours for construction workers. The U.S. House referred the bill to the committee for education and the workforce , where it’s still under consideration. 

OSHA presented the proposed rule to the Advisory Committee on Construction Safety and Health in April 2024, followed by OSHA publishing a notice of proposed rulemaking in the Federal Register. 

But now, Chincanchan said the comments are a big step. 

“It’s important for folks who are working on this proposed rule to hear directly from the workers who have experienced heat illness or heat injuries or have seen their colleagues and their co-workers experience this,” Chincanchan said. “Heat illness is absolutely underreported and the personal stories are incredibly important right now.” 

Candido Batiz, a 46-year-old Honduran father of three, has worked in construction for years and says he has suffered heat stroke multiple times. He thought working in high-heat conditions without water or breaks or medical assistance was normal in the United States. He never thought to ask for protections until he met members from the Workers Defense Project. 

“It was in the middle of July. We were working changing the siding on a house, and the heat was intense, and I was working on a staircase and I got dizzy and almost fell. I started to sweat a lot, a lot, a lot,” Batiz said in Spanish. “We had to stop working. I arrived at my house in bad shape, I stopped working for three days.”

And if he gets sick, Batiz doesn’t want to turn to the doctor or go to the emergency room because of the expense. A single visit to the hospital could cost him thousands of dollars that he doesn’t have. In his comments about the new OSHA rule comments, he plans to ask for medical assistance for heat stroke or heat stress. 

“It would be important to me that heat stroke be declared a natural disaster,” Batiz said. “Because right now I’m getting heat stroke, but that can have consequences on my body, like kidney damage or other parts of my body. I wouldn’t be able to live or support my family with those problems.”

Is OSHA enough?

At a press conference in early September, Rep. Sylvia Garcia and acting secretary for the U.S. Department of Labor, Julie Su, urged workers to tell their stories to OSHA, particularly because employers and officials opposed to a federal rule will also be submitting comments.

“Employers today do not want to do the common sense thing,” Garcia said. “They will say it will cost them too much to have a paid rest break, that it’ll cost too much to have to follow a rule that they’ve got to train you and equip you to make sure you know the signs of heat exhaustion or getting sick, that it’ll cost them too much.” 

Solis, who attended the press conference, shakes her head, upset at the thought of these excuses.  

Her lunch break is at 6:30 in the morning, just after she arrives, because her employer doesn’t want the team to waste time during the busy airport hours. Once she let her teammate leave to use the restroom and her boss told her to stop that. 

“My supervisor said, well, you have to move to the next aircraft, why did you say she could use the restroom?,” Solis said. “We’re going as fast as we can. We can’t go any faster because we’re tired from all this heat.” 

A OSHA rule is just the first step for a lot of Texas advocates, however. Chincanchan says he would like to see state policies changes as well – especially to increase the amount of inspectors. In Texas, there is one OSHA investigator per 103,899 workers, according to data collected by Workers Defense Project. 

This makes investigations into heat safety difficult and drawn out. An employee could submit a complaint and it could possibly take weeks to months for an OSHA inspector to conduct an investigation. If there were state regulations as well, then employees would have more resources. 

Still, Chincanchan is optimistic. 

“Even with a limited number of inspectors and the limited number of resources, I think the federal government can mobilize to address particularly egregious situations where workers are being put in extremely dangerous situations,” he said. “But there’s nothing stopping the state government from acting other than their lack of political will on this situation.” 

Eileen Grench contributed to this reporting.

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