Those mandatory water break laws confuse me. Is it because businesses are refusing to let their workers take water breaks? Or because workers don’t realize when they need a water break? I find it hard to believe either of those things are generally true*. *: Perhaps there are some outliers - businesses that genuinely slavedrive their workers, or workers that genuinely can’t tell when they’re about to die. But are tho…
Folks on site often just want to get the job done and can view stuff like regular breaks for water as an obstacle if they feel they don’t need it, whether that’s an individual working through their break or a crew chief who grumbles about people setting tools down for it. Unfortunately people aren’t very good judges of when they need a break for water working in hot conditions. Cal-OSHA has an entire additional train…
I’ve worked in heavily OSHA-regulated industries (complete with “random unannounced safety inspections”, including being interviewed by OSHA). At least in my experience in Australia, OSHA was pretty good about enforcing the more effective and less onerous safety measures (that neither us nor our boss cared much about, but objectively did benefit from, so OSHA did good work there), and not enforcing the less effective and more onerous safety measures (some of which were frankly ridiculous, like requiring three points of contact at all times when climbing a staircase to a tool storage shed - it is quite difficult to carry anything up stairs when you have to have both hands on the railings whenever you lift a foot!)
Perhaps that is the best argument for removing these laws. OSHA has a lot of expertise in managing the balance of safety and productivity, so they should be the ones in charge of deciding on how often and how mandatory heat breaks should be. These laws made by non-OSHA bodies are perhaps too rigid: they could simultaneously be overkill for some situations (like indoor installations) while being wholly insufficient for other situations (like road repair) - and yet the workers, the employees, and the safety inspectors all working together in the goal of safety are unable to adapt them to the situation because it rests with uninvolved (and potentially even uninformed) lawmakers instead. I’d note that from reading the article it doesn’t seem like this is the major motivation behind the attempt to repeal these laws, although something like this is marshaled as an argument.
edit to add: apparently OSHA standards already limit work in 104F conditions to a maximum of 20 minutes per hour and unlimited cool-down breaks whenever the worker requests it, which is far more generous than these water break laws. There is some suggestion that in fact the real purpose of these water break laws were to give companies a way to circumvent the more restrictive OSHA requirements. Things may be much more complicated than they first appeared.