Trump's Labor Department Proposes Repealing More Than 60 Worker Safety And Wage Rules, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That A Dangerous Job Was Still Required To Account For The Danger

WASHINGTON. The Department of Labor announced on Tuesday that it would seek to rewrite or repeal more than 60 federal regulations governing workplace safety and pay, resolving a long-standing concern that the Americans assigned to the country's most hazardous jobs were still covered by some of the rules written to keep them alive.

The department presented the package as a routine modernization effort to clear away outdated and burdensome requirements, a description it applied to provisions spanning the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Mine Safety and Health Administration, and the Wage and Hour Division. Among the rules slated for removal are the requirement that construction sites maintain adequate lighting, which OSHA proposed to drop on the reasoning that its general duty to address hazards was sufficient, and the authority of mine safety district managers to require upgrades to a mine's ventilation and safety plans, which would be returned to the operators who run the mines.

Also targeted were two protections for the workers who harvest the nation's food. One proposal would remove the requirement that employers provide seatbelts in the vehicles used to transport farmworkers. A second would rescind a 2024 rule barring employers from retaliating against migrant agricultural workers who report unsafe or unlawful conditions, a safeguard the department characterized as unnecessary on the grounds that the workers remained free to report and the employers remained free to respond.

A further proposal would narrow OSHA's general duty clause so that it no longer applied to jobs the agency deemed inherently risky, a category that the department indicated would include stunt work, live animal shows, and similar entertainment, on the theory that a worker who accepts a dangerous job has accepted the danger. "We are modernizing a body of rules that had not kept pace," said one official familiar with the effort, who declined to specify which of the hazards the rules addressed had since ceased to exist.

Labor advocates noted that mining, construction, and agriculture rank year after year among the deadliest industries in the country, and that the agencies now proposing to step back were created in direct response to the disasters that preceded them. The department countered that nothing in the package eliminated a worker's underlying interest in not being injured, and that the changes simply removed the corresponding federal requirement that someone plan for it in advance. Critics warned the rollbacks would fall hardest on women and on communities of color, who are overrepresented in several of the affected fields.

At press time, the Labor Department had clarified that nothing in the proposals prevented an employer from lighting a worksite, ventilating a mine, or buckling in a farmworker on its own initiative, and that the decision, along with the outcome, would now belong to the people doing the work.