One of the main arguments against heat safety regulations is based on a general profit argument: regulation will cost industry money. On the face of it, this seems intuitive: surely safety regulations would impose costs, such as the cost of providing shade, water and breaks. At the very least, if workers are taking breaks, they are not working in those breaks. So, the regulations will cost money, and the owners will lose profit.
If we suppose that this is true, given what we know about the harm of heat exposure (such as death), then opposing such regulations would be evil because it values profit over human well-being. Obviously, those who are willing to hurt (even kill) other people for profit will disagree with me. However, the fact is that effective safety practices increase profits.
The most popular example of this is how Paul O’Neil became the CEO of Alcoa in 1987 with the goal of zero worker injuries. O’Neil knew that improving worker safety in the right ways would also benefit the bottom line and was proved right.
In general terms, good safety practices can improve profits by reducing downtime and lost productivity. They can also reduce the costs imposed by damaged equipment, hiring, retaining and insurance. In general, good safety practices provide a positive return on investment per dollar. But what about heat safety? Would that help the bottom line?
Heat and dehydration reduce productivity for obvious reasons. For those who doubt this, it is easy to test by heat suicide: get out in the heat and do hard work without breaks or hydration to see what happens. Do not do this since it could kill you. Heat and dehydration also cause confusion and impair thinking; this leads to more accidents and bad choices that can impact the bottom line. There are also medical costs with heat exposure (which businesses try to pass on to workers, of course) and the fact that needlessly harsh working conditions lead to labor shortages as people do not want to work in such conditions. This is one of the many reasons American businesses often like illegal migrant labor: they can coerce them into working in dangerous conditions and pay them less. But getting back to why heat safety is good.
Hydration and shade breaks allow workers to recover and work at an overall higher efficiency than if workers were forced to push through heat. Again, you can (but should not) test this yourself. Given that safety practices improve profits, why would business leaders fight even good regulations that would make them more money?
While motivations can be difficult to prove, a reasonable inference would be that causing suffering and harm is the point. After all, if they would make more money by following good safety practices, then they are not being motivated by money. A good hypothesis would be that they are cruel, and evil given that they would be doing cruel and evil things. But when confronted with such claims, business geniuses have some replies.
One stock reply is that they are not evil, they are just operating withing the present value bias (discounting the future). A business leader might know that good heat safety practices would make more money in the long term, but they might claim that it is more profitable right now to not follow those practices. While this is still evil, it also seems untrue in the case of heat safety: heat safety now yields profits now. As such, even the short-term profit argument fails. So, a business leader would need to be either ignorant or extra evil (or both).
Another reply is the “someone else will do it, so I should too.” One could try to justify not following good heat safety practices by claiming that complying will put a business at a disadvantage against those who do not comply. One could, of course, apply that to many things that are regulated. This is like someone arguing they should sell cocaine or murder their business rivals because someone else will do the same. Also, heat safety practices give a business an advantage over those that do not do this; so opposing effective heat safety just reveals one is ignorant or evil (or both).
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