The Department of Labor announced upcoming opportunities in 2023 for small business owners and other entities to join the Occupational Safety and Health Administration for a series of Small Business Regulatory Enforcement Fairness Act panels to explain the possible impacts to small business from OSHA’s pending rulemaking on heat injury and illness prevention in outdoor and indoor work settings. SWACCA submitted comments on OSHA’s heat injury and illness advanced notice of proposed rulemaking with AWCI in January 2022. SBREFA panels are intended for OSHA to get feedback from small businesses and other entities that would be affected by the pending heat injury and illness standard. Interested parties that qualify can seek to be selected to be Small Entity Representatives that will be provided information to review on the pending rulemaking, and then participate in a small-group teleconference to detail concerns and provide input on how a federal heat injury and illness regulation may affect the operations of their workplace.

The topics to be considered at the upcoming SBREFA panels will include potential options for the scope of a potential federal standard, a programmatic approach to heat injury and illness prevention, heat hazard identification and assessment, heat hazard prevention and control measures, medical treatment and heat-related emergency response procedures, worker training and recordkeeping.

Those interested in participating in the upcoming SBREFA meetings must email Bruce Lundegren with the Small Business Administration at Bruce.Lundegren@sba.gov or OSHA at OSHAEvents_DSG@dol.gov and should review the criteria for selection here.