In the spring of 2024 the Florida Legislature took away its own counties' power to protect outdoor workers from heat. No water rule, no shade rule, no rest-break rule, no acclimation period for the new guy on his first week on a roof in July.
The staff analysis the Florida House wrote for itself described the ground the bill was about to change, in one flat sentence: "Currently, there are no specific federal or state laws that provide heat exposure protections for outdoor workers."
That sentence is the whole argument. Cities should not be writing heat rules, because heat rules are Washington's job, and Washington has not gotten around to it.
On July 21 of this year, a House committee in Washington voted 18 to 15 to make sure it never does.
What Florida made illegal in 2024
Start with the Florida half, because it is short and it is still on the books.
Florida Statutes § 448.106, created by chapter 2024-80, defines a "heat exposure requirement" as a standard controlling a worker's exposure to heat or sun. The statute then lists what it means, and the list is not vague. Employee monitoring and protection. Water consumption. Cooling measures. Acclimation and recovery periods. Posted notices telling workers how to keep from cooking. Training. First aid. Protection for a worker who reports that the heat made him sick.
Then subsection (2)(a) says a county, a city, or any other political subdivision "may not establish, mandate, or otherwise require an employer, including an employer contracting to provide goods or services to the political subdivision, to meet or provide heat exposure requirements not otherwise required under state or federal law."
Hold onto those last eight words. They are load-bearing, and everything below turns on them.
Subsection (2)(b) goes one step further than a ban. A Florida county cannot give a bidding preference to the contractor who protects its crews, and cannot "consider or seek information relating to the employer's heat exposure requirements." The county is barred from rewarding good behavior, and barred from asking about it.
The bill carrying that language, CS/CS/HB 433, passed the Florida House 74 to 36, was signed by the Governor on April 11, 2024, and took effect that July 1.
The Washington bill is one sentence long
Now the Washington half. H.R. 6213, the Heat Workforce Standards Act, was introduced on November 20, 2025 by Rep. Mark Messmer of Indiana along with 23 cosponsors, one of them Rep. Daniel Webster of Florida. Strip the title and the bill is one sentence:
"The Secretary of Labor may not finalize, implement, or enforce the proposed standard titled 'Heat Injury and Illness Prevention in Outdoor and Indoor Work Settings' published by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in the Federal Register on August 30, 2024 (89 Fed. Reg. 70698), or any substantially similar standard."
On July 21, 2026, the official bill record shows the House Committee on Education and Workforce ordered it reported, as amended, by a vote of 18 to 15. The Senate companion, S. 4427, was introduced by Sen. Bill Cassidy on April 29, 2026 with eight cosponsors and sits in the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.
The amended text is not public. No committee report has been filed and no reported version of the bill appears in the Government Publishing Office's bill collection as of today. The sentence quoted above is the bill as introduced. If the committee softened it, I cannot see how, and neither can you.
Water, shade, and a coworker looking at you
You can read the rule both bills are aimed at. It has been public since August 30, 2024, at 89 Fed. Reg. 70698, and you can read what it would require.
Two thresholds. The initial heat trigger is a heat index of 80 degrees. The high heat trigger is a heat index of 90.
At 80, your boss would owe you drinking water that is "suitably cool," placed where you can reach it, in enough quantity for one quart per worker per hour. A break area with real shade, or air conditioning if the break area is a trailer. And for a new hire, one of two things in that first week, employer's choice. Either a plan that moves the high-heat measures in the next paragraph down to 80 degrees for the week, or a shift that ramps instead of dropping him straight into a full day: 20 percent of a normal shift on day one, 40 on day two, 60 on day three, 80 on day four. An employer who takes the first option owes no ramp at all.
At 90, a paid rest break of at least 15 minutes every two hours, in that break area. Somebody watching for the signs, either a buddy system or a supervisor responsible for no more than 20 people. A worker who is alone gets a radio or a phone and a check-in every two hours.
That is the tyranny. Water, shade, a paid quarter hour, and a coworker looking at you.
OSHA put a number on what it would buy. In its own preliminary analysis, the agency estimated the standard would prevent 531 heat fatalities out of an estimated 559 a year, and 16,027 heat injuries and illnesses out of an estimated 24,656. OSHA also said that those figures carry "considerable uncertainty," and you should hold them as the agency's projection rather than a body count. The counted number is smaller and colder: the Bureau of Labor Statistics logged 1,042 American workers dead of environmental heat between 1992 and 2022, an average of 34 a year, 43 in 2022 alone. Nobody thinks that is the real total, including OSHA, which is why the estimate and the count are so far apart. If Florida keeps a count of how many of its own workers die of heat, it is not in any report this show could open.
The rule would cover roughly 36 million workers. If you frame a house, pave a road, pick a crop, load a truck, cook on a line, or work a warehouse without air conditioning, you are one of them.
The ban only bites while Washington does nothing
Go back to that clause in the Florida statute: "not otherwise required under state or federal law."
Florida did not outlaw heat protection. Florida outlawed local heat protection, and it wrote the ban so that it only bites in the space where no state or federal rule exists. If OSHA finalized its standard tomorrow, every employer in Florida would owe the water and the paid break, county ordinance or not, and § 448.106 would have nothing left to forbid.
So the Florida preemption is not a policy. It is a bet on federal inaction. And H.R. 6213 is a bill to guarantee the bet.
The bills put nothing in the rule's place
Take the other side seriously, because its argument is written down. Unlike the House bill, the Senate version carries a findings section, and it says the OSHA proposal is "overly prescriptive, burdensome to businesses, and confusing for workers," that "high-heat triggers, stringent protocols around rest breaks, strict acclimatization protocols, and highly detailed written safety plans, make the proposed standard unworkable," and that one rule covering "all industries and geographies" will "undermine worker safety." There is a real version of that. A drywall crew in Phoenix and a fish house in Maine do not have the same August, and a small contractor cannot restructure a workday the way a national builder can.
That argument does not survive the bills themselves. Neither one replaces the rule with a better one, a flexible one, or a state-by-state one. Both forbid the Secretary of Labor from issuing "any substantially similar standard," and neither puts a single protection in the space they clear. When the federal option is closed and the local option was closed in 2024, what is left for a worker in Florida is the general duty clause of a 1970 statute, which is what OSHA is using right now and which requires nobody to hand anybody a bottle of water. The one route left is a union contract that spells the water out, in a state that has spent decades making that contract harder to get and cheaper to ignore.
Miami-Dade deferred it to March. The ban passed in March.
Florida already ran the experiment on paper. In November 2023, Miami-Dade commissioners took up an ordinance requiring construction and agriculture employers with five or more workers to guarantee water and a 10-minute shade break every two hours when the heat index hit 95. The county deferred it to March. The Legislature passed HB 433 in March. That ordinance is now illegal to pass.
The state also wrote down what its own bill would do. Under "direct economic impact on private sector," the House staff analysis lists the effects in six plain bullets. The fourth says the bill may "prevent businesses from being required to provide costly workplace heat exposure protections." The fifth, the very next line, says it may "prevent workers from earning a wage that allows them to live in the area that they work."
They knew. It is in the file. Bless their hearts.
The comment period, the floor vote, and the door Tallahassee left open
Three things, all of them dated, none of them "raise awareness."
The docket reopens in December, and you can be in it. The Labor Department's own regulatory agenda, published August 14, 2026, schedules a supplemental proposed rule for December 2026 and final action for October 2027. A supplemental proposal opens a new public comment period on Docket No. OSHA-2021-0009 at regulations.gov. Comments from working people are worth more than they feel like, because the agency has to answer them in the record.
H.R. 6213 is out of committee and has not had a floor vote. Which makes the useful question to your House member small enough that a form letter cannot dodge it: will you vote no on H.R. 6213, the Heat Workforce Standards Act. Ask for a yes or a no. Write down which one you got.
The one local door Tallahassee left open. Subsection (3) of § 448.106 says the ban "does not limit the authority of a political subdivision to establish or otherwise provide heat exposure requirements ..." for its own direct employees. (The ellipsis holds the statute's own qualifier, "not otherwise required under state or federal law," which is the same self-limiting clause the rest of this piece turns on.) A county cannot make its paving contractor carry water. It can still make its own road crews' heat plan real, in public, at a commission meeting anybody can speak at. It is a small door, and it is the only one still unlocked. Florida has spent twenty years teaching people that local government cannot do anything about work, from the minimum wage to votes that already happened, and the habit of not asking outlasts the law that caused it.
The rest is math anybody can do. Two governments, two years apart, each one pointing at the other. One says the locals should not act because Washington will. The other says Washington may not act, ever, or issue anything like it. Stand in the middle of those two documents on a Tuesday in August with a shovel in your hand and see what protects you.
Nothing protects you, and it took two legislatures, two years and a great deal of paperwork to arrange that.
Come back for the rest
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The Receipts
Every claim above traces to a document you can open yourself. All sources accessed September 1, 2026.
- Florida Statutes § 448.106, Workplace heat exposure requirements (Florida Legislature, created by s. 1, ch. 2024-80, subsections (1), (2)(a), (2)(b) and (3); accessed September 1, 2026): the nine heat exposure requirements, the preemption of local rules, the bidding bar, and the carve-out for a subdivision's own employees.
- Staff Final Bill Analysis, CS/CS/HB 433, Employment Regulations (Florida House of Representatives, storage name h0433z1.DOCX, April 15, 2024; accessed September 1, 2026): the finding that no federal or state heat protections existed, the 74-36 floor vote, and the April 11, 2024 approval as ch. 2024-80.
- H.R. 6213, Heat Workforce Standards Act of 2025, as introduced (119th Congress, BILLS-119hr6213ih.xml, Government Publishing Office, introduced November 20, 2025; accessed September 1, 2026): the operative sentence quoted in the body, Rep. Messmer's 23 cosponsors including Rep. Webster of Florida, and the committee referral.
- Official bill status record for H.R. 6213 (BILLSTATUS-119hr6213.xml, Government Publishing Office; accessed September 1, 2026): the July 21, 2026 committee action, ordered reported (amended) 18 to 15, and the absence of any committee report.
- S. 4427, Heat Workforce Standards Act of 2026, as introduced (119th Congress, BILLS-119s4427is.xml, Government Publishing Office, introduced April 29, 2026; accessed September 1, 2026): Sen. Cassidy's introduction with eight cosponsors, the HELP Committee referral, and the identical operative prohibition.
- Heat Injury and Illness Prevention in Outdoor and Indoor Work Settings (OSHA notice of proposed rulemaking, 89 Fed. Reg. 70698, August 30, 2024, Docket OSHA-2021-0009, RIN 1218-AD39; accessed September 1, 2026): the proposed heat triggers, water, shade, acclimatization and rest-break requirements, and OSHA's own casualty estimates.
- Agenda of Regulations, entry 294 (U.S. Department of Labor, 91 Fed. Reg. 53020, August 14, 2026, RIN 1218-AD39; accessed September 1, 2026): the timetable through final action in October 2027, and the statement that OSHA "currently relies on the general duty clause."