The fate of federal heat safety rules under Trump
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Hey, everybody. I'm Rima Grace. Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where we make today make sense. And I'm Kimberly Adams. Thanks, everyone, for joining us. It is Wednesday, June 25th.

Yes, today we are going to get into some news, then do some smiles, the usual. Kimberly, what caught your attention today? It's the thing that I absolutely cannot ignore if I even dare to step outside, which is how ungodly hot it is outside. And, you know... What's it like over there exactly? You're in D.C., I'm in Oregon, so it's very different. So I'm running the dehumidifier in my apartment and pulling out something like, I don't know,

20 gallons of water out of my apartment. Maybe that's exaggerating. It's probably more like 10 gallons of water out of my apartment per day, but I have to empty the dehumidifier every couple hours. It's a lot of humidity. It's a lot of heat. And God bless air conditioning for all of its

you know, impacts on the environment. But, you know, my heart just really goes out to folks who have to work outside in this heat. And it's so dangerous. I mean, heat, especially heat combined with humidity can be incredibly dangerous, incredibly deadly. And so towards the tail end of the Biden administration, they were working on new rules to actually regulate heat

in the workplace. And I'm just going to read a little bit from an article in Inc. Magazine. Okay. There was a proposed rule that would require employers to offer paid breaks as needed once the temperature reaches 80 degrees Fahrenheit. When the temperature exceeds 90 degrees Fahrenheit, employers...

Fahrenheit, employers must offer a 15-minute paid break to workers every two hours. The rule would also require companies to offer breaks in either air-conditioned settings or when outdoors in shaded areas, directing companies to create structures that offer shade. So this is a proposed rule. Everybody knows I love a good regulation. The public comment period is closed. But what's happening right now

now, like this week and leading up until July 2nd, the OSHA, the Occupational Safe and Healthy Health Administration, is doing a series of informal public hearings about this rule so that they can finalize the rulemaking. So they did the public comment period, and now they're doing these informal hearings. And we're going to have the link in the show notes, but you can actually watch the live stream

yourself if you want to see these hearings. You can go back and look at the previous hearings. One of them was actually this morning and I went and looked at some of it and it's mainly like business associations and business owners weighing in.

Because they're, obviously, this is going to cost them money. Right, right. And they're asking either to raise the temperature threshold or to make the rules a little bit easier. But this is people's lives. And as the temperature continues to rise, as we continue to have, you know, higher temperatures and more severe weather as a result of climate change, you know, how these rules turn out will really matter to a lot of people. So, yeah.

You know, I do believe people can still weigh in in some capacity, but definitely worth checking in on these hearings and seeing how this turns out if OSHA under the Trump administration even decides to issue the rule.

Because remember, they don't have to. They don't have to, yeah. And this leads me to another bit of news this week related to heat, which is that tomorrow on Thursday, President Trump's nominee to lead OSHA is up for a vote in the Senate. His name is David Keeling, and he is a former health and safety executive at UPS. And there's an interesting New York Times article where many former UPS employees said

that when he was running UPS as the health and safety executive, that he ignored their concerns over, guess what? Heat. Right. Heat in particular. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. A couple of things stand out to me hearing you talk about this.

Heat is one of those things where it's not always visible. It's not as dramatic as operating a faulty machine or whatever. But there's one of the articles you linked. It says extreme heat kills more U.S. residents annually than all other disasters, which is remarkable. Heat exhaustion, getting heat stroke. If you haven't experienced that, I hope you never have. The symptoms sneak up very unexpectedly. And so...

It's relying on workers to signal that to their employees and to their employers rather feels dangerous to me. But also the other thing that comes up for me when you when hearing this story is that it feels like regulating extreme heat has become an urgent but also undercover labor issue. And, you know, we talk a lot about climate change in terms of sea level rise or mega fires, but.

To your point, yeah, for millions of people, the most immediate impact is whether it's safe to do their job. Yeah, so I just appreciate you pointing this out because it is important and folks should get involved and check it out if you haven't already. Yeah, and I mean, this is one of those things where it's like, you know, let your senator know how you feel ahead of their vote tomorrow. But also, yeah.

This is a real cost for small businesses as well. And this is one of the concerns that a lot of the people in the business industry have been raising of what it would actually cost them to implement these rules. The OSHA estimates that it would be something like $8.2 billion per year to comply with the rule. The SBA, the Small Business Administration says those costs would be higher.

And one of the people who was testifying today was saying, like, look, you know, the temperature guidelines are helpful, but 80 degrees in North Carolina is very different than 80 degrees in Arizona. And 80 degrees if you're in a seaside town with a nice breeze. And so, you know, there need to be other considerations. Fair. Yeah.

Fair. And I think that that's why they're having these hearings to try to get an understanding of the impact. Now then, I should also point out, and this was in a story in the Scientific American, is that all of the experts, or at least the vast majority of them who actually helped write these regulations,

at OSHA, at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an agency called NIOSH that actually helped put this rule together. They all got caught up in the doge cuts. Wow. The heat safety experts. That's important to note. Okay. What do you have? I'm going to talk about housing today. So there's a lot of housing data that came out this week. Today we got some data on home sales numbers.

And it shows that sales of new homes took a pretty big hit in May. According to the latest numbers, we saw sales of newly built single homes dropped nearly 14%. So about 623,000 homes sold down from 720,000 in April. So it's a bigger drop than economists expected.

Meanwhile, on the flip side, there was a lot of surprise, or not a lot. There was some surprise earlier this week when we got numbers on sales of existing homes. So sales ticked up last month for the first time in three months, but they're still hovering near record lows. And of course, the reason behind all of this is because homes are still expensive. Mortgage rates are high. They're stuck above 6.5%, which is making buyers cautious.

There was this pretty wild stat I saw in the Wall Street Journal. It said that a household making $100,000 a year today could only afford about 37% of homes on the market. Six years ago, that same income could afford nearly twice as many. So even though more homes are finally becoming available, great news for buyers, it hasn't translated into more sales. So you have sellers who are cutting prices,

In some places like the Southeast and Southwest, it's turning into more of a buyer's market. But all in all, affordability is still a major issue here, even with more choices. And I think we hosted maybe a couple months ago when I mentioned the couple that I talked to on the podcast that I host, This Is Uncomfortable. So for folks who may have not listened to that episode, going through the news this week, it reminded me of them. I talked with this couple where

And I talked to lots of folks on the show about how they're just pinching pennies, trying to afford a home, trying to figure out if that's even a possibility for them. And this one couple, you know, is such a window into how even when you decide you want a home, there are all these internal negotiations that go on with yourself, with your couple. And the short of their situation was that, you know, one person was very adamant that they wanted to buy now. The other person was like, no, we have to wait. Right.

And so they just kept butting heads. Ultimately, they ended up buying, I think, like a $1.1 million house, but only they were able to afford it because they work in tech. And one partner put down like half a million dollars towards the down payment by liquidating her company stock. Yeah.

Yeah, the housing market just feels impossible these days. I know. Unless you are, you know, like that couple that you talked to, like so wealthy and have that much cash sitting around, sitting around. Yeah. Let's move on to some smiles. Sounded like we were almost harmonizing.

The New York Democratic, New York City Democratic primary was of great interest to me, not just because of the politics of it, but because...

they are successfully deploying ranked choice voting. And we did a deep dive on ranked choice voting some time ago, and we're going to have the link in the show notes. And a lot of advocates and pro-democracy folks really think that ranked choice voting is a great strategy to get us away from some of the political polarization that we are experiencing. And if you saw

Mamdani and Lander on The Colbert Show the other night talking about sort of cross-promoting each other on the ranked choice ballot. Like, oh, nice. Look at people working together and being collaborative in terms of, you know, coming up with solutions for the benefit of New Yorkers. And I think that having an example like

Of a ranked choice voting system going well in a city like New York bodes well for other communities that are thinking about it or considering it. Although some people will hate it just because it's New York. But anyway, seeing that deployed well made me smile. Yeah, we did it here in Portland. And it was the first time the city did it.

And as a voter, you know, yes, it was a bit confusing at first. We got like a huge packet. I spent many hours sifting through the different candidates and learning more about them because I had, I can't remember off the top of my head right now, but at least a dozen candidates to learn about. But in the end, it got me more invested in my local politics and my community. And it, I, at least, I mean, depending on who you talk to, I think it was received pretty well because, um,

For folks who are not so familiar with it, you don't have to rank all of the candidates. So you can be a bit more strategic and leave out the ones that you don't want to vote for. And so there was a coordinated campaign to some degree here in Portland where there was an unfavorable candidate and they decided there was a movement to not rank them at all. And they didn't make it to the city council in the end.

Portland got a progressive majority of council members and a mayor who was pulling, I believe third, but then quickly gained momentum just a few days before the election. And so, yeah, it's pretty, it's pretty amazing to see it work out in a different city, a city as big as New York. All right. So what's my make me smile. Oh, okay. So Courtney, our producer sent me this article about mangoes as I was eating a mango salad. So I thought I have to, I have to talk about this. I love mangoes. Uh,

So this article is from The New York Times. It talks about how the mango business is very intense. So when you think about mangoes, they are fragile, easy for them to get mushy. And the window to sell them is very short. And there's a high demand. I think it's only from like April to June. And on top of that, the profit margins are slim. So this article talks about the intense competition, especially in New Jersey, which is home to one of the nation's largest populations of Indian immigrants.

And there are a dozen of importers in the area and they do this like seasonal side hustle. So a lot of the folks who do this hustle, like one guy runs a convenience store full time, another is a dentist. But every year they go all in on mangoes. They are like roping in their cousins and their kids. They're loading boxes into trucks, making airport runs, delivering them to grocery stores, etc.

And there's this one quote in the article of an importer and he says, we are doing it for the love of mangoes because apparently they only make like two to three dollars in profit on each of the boxes they sell. And demand for mangoes from India is especially high because most of our mangoes actually come from Mexico. But lots of folks will spend a lot of money on the mangoes from India because it reminds them of their childhood. There's like a quote in here that says it reminds them of the

mango tree from their grandmother's house. And they don't even look at the price. They just want a taste of home. I thought that was really sweet. That like, yeah, a lot of our purchases are not rational. A lot of the business endeavors are not rational. But it's more than just that. It's about memory and about culture and about home. And I thought that was really beautiful. It reminds me of

There's a similar Middle Eastern tradition around fresh dates, especially during Ramadan, which I'm sure you're familiar with. Yeah. Yeah. I love fresh dates. They're so good. And it's really hard to get them here in the United States. It's really hard. Yeah. And similarly, yeah, you want to, there are certain varieties that are prized and seasonal and people go out of their way to get the quote unquote real ones. Like I'm kind of a snob when it comes to dates for that reason. Yeah.

I totally get it. This whole story and looking at all these photos, it just like makes me itchy because I'm like very allergic to mangoes. Are you? I know. Everyone feels so sad. That's exactly what everybody says whenever they find out. They're like, how do you live? Yeah. I learned that lesson the hard way in Egypt where there are amazing mangoes and they are not for me. And you just break out.

At first, yeah, just a breakout. But then as I tried to ignore what was happening to me, the reaction started getting more and more severe. And then basically the doctor was like, if you keep eating mangoes, you're like going to go into anaphylactic shock. So you need to just like stop. So anyway, I'm glad other people can enjoy the wonders of mangoes, but we should wrap it up for the day. Let's wrap it. Yes.

All right, that's it for us today. Keep sending us your comments and questions, by the way. You can email us at makemesmartatmarketplace.org or you can leave us a voicemail at 508-UBSmart. Make Me Smart is produced by Courtney Bergseeker. Today's program was engineered by Justin Duller. Daisy Palacios is our supervising senior producer. Nancy Fergali is executive producer of Marketplace Shows. And Joanne Griffith is our chief content officer.

Everyone go out and enjoy mangoes for me. I mean, I will. I definitely will.

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