The Trump Administration will face a decision on whether to enact OSHA Regulation proposed by the Biden Administration that intended to protect workers from high outdoor heat.
"Using the language of Marxist Economics, if firms can expropriate surplus from workers, wouldn’t these firms want the workers to be healthy and productive so that there is more to extract?"
This is probably the crux of the issue. I think working from home is a good example of where firms clearly failed. Prior to the pandemic, WFH was non-existent. It clearly makes workers happier and probably more productive (not necessarily in a per hour sense but on a total basis. If we account for office costs, than WFH is always superior). The question is then why did firms fail to implement it themselves and we needed a global pandemic to shock us into a new equilibrium?
Could we see such a regulation creating incentives to accelerate the creation of technologies that can deal with heat since now there's a guaranteed large market?
Since neither the people that working the heat nor their employers want them to be harmed, where is the market distortion that needs to be corrected regulatorily? Is it a “standards” problem there was an informal set of “rules” that was OK for a different climate and we need a different set for a different climate?
"Using the language of Marxist Economics, if firms can expropriate surplus from workers, wouldn’t these firms want the workers to be healthy and productive so that there is more to extract?"
This is probably the crux of the issue. I think working from home is a good example of where firms clearly failed. Prior to the pandemic, WFH was non-existent. It clearly makes workers happier and probably more productive (not necessarily in a per hour sense but on a total basis. If we account for office costs, than WFH is always superior). The question is then why did firms fail to implement it themselves and we needed a global pandemic to shock us into a new equilibrium?
Could we see such a regulation creating incentives to accelerate the creation of technologies that can deal with heat since now there's a guaranteed large market?
Since neither the people that working the heat nor their employers want them to be harmed, where is the market distortion that needs to be corrected regulatorily? Is it a “standards” problem there was an informal set of “rules” that was OK for a different climate and we need a different set for a different climate?