The Trump administration nominated former veteran UPS and Amazon executive David Keeling to head the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) last month. Keeling is being tasked with the rollback of workplace safety rules and regulations nominally intended to protect workers.

Keeling will serve directly under Trump nominee for US Secretary of Labor, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, who is likely to be approved by the US Senate.

Chavez-DeRemer and Keeling have gained support from the corporate-aligned trade union bureaucracy, including Teamsters President Sean O’Brien. The Teamsters praised Keeling in a post on X/Twitter, a platform owned by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who has a vested interest in weakening workplace safety regulations.

The Teamster post said, “Keeling worked as a part-time package handler at United Parcel Service before spending nearly 20 years with UPS,” referring to his start at UPS when he was a college student in Louisville, Kentucky, while glossing over his rapid rise from the warehouse to the executive offices.

In response one worker angrily posted, “What are we doing congratulating someone from UPS management? Where’s my air conditioning in the truck? We had an epidemic of drivers either dying or getting severely injured by heat exhaustion! And we are congratulating someone from UPS safety?!”

Despite paying occasional lip service to health and safety, Keeling as UPS vice president for global safety, oversaw a regime that placed the profits of management above the lives of workers. Under his watch the company had refused to install air conditioning on delivery vehicles in order to save on fuel costs all the while imposing grueling production targets on drivers.

In August 2023 The World Socialist Web Site reported on the heat-related death of a Texas UPS driver from prolonged on-the-job exposure to a 108-degree Fahrenheit temperatures, The worker, 57-year-old UPS worker Christopher Begley, a 28-year UPS veteran, died after collapsing on the job while delivering a package near McKinney, a suburb of Dallas, Texas.

Subsequently, Keeling served as Director of Road and Transportation Safety at Amazon from 2021 to 2023, during the early stages of the ongoing pandemic. Amazon, founded by billionaire oligarch Jeff Bezos, is a company notorious for unsafe workplace conditions and an extraordinarily high injury rate.

In December of last year, the WSWS posted an article concerning the OSHA whitewash of the deaths of three Amazon workers in 2022, who died at separate Amazon warehouses in New Jersey within weeks of each other. The three, Rafael Mota Frias, Rodger Boland and Eric Vadinsky all died under brutal conditions involving excessive heat.

A report into the deaths was delayed by OSHA. And when it was finally released, it held Amazon blameless. The whitewash was another example of the toothless nature of OSHA regulations and fines, which are aimed at shielding corporations, not protecting workers. Keeling’s nomination illustrates the perpetual revolving door between industry and government regulatory agencies under both Democrats and Republicans. As a result, the very corporate criminals violating the rights of workers and the public are the ones put in charge of regulating their industries.

At the US Postal Service (USPS) workers are experiencing deeper cuts and the worsening of already dangerous working conditions as part of the drive toward privatization. One tragic case was the heat-related death of Eugene Gates, 66, a Dallas, Texas USPS veteran of 38 years, who collapsed and died while on the job in 2023. “On the day of Gates’s death, the heat index (that is what the temperature feels like to the human body when relative humidity is considered) was 115 degrees,” reported the WSWS.

USPS had recently changed starting times from 7:30 a.m. to 8:30 a.m., thus increasing workers’ exposure to temperatures in the hottest hours of the day. After Gates’s death, USPS restored the previous start time.

A 2023 Department of Labor report cited 5,283 workplace deaths in the US, with an estimated 120,000 additional deaths from occupational illnesses. Trump’s deregulatory agenda is expected to worsen these conditions, prioritizing corporate profits over worker safety.

Even mild workplace safety reforms introduced by Democrats have been rolled back by previous Republican administrations. Pro-business trade publications like Fisher Phillips have outlined expected rollbacks under Trump’s OSHA nominee, Keeling. These include:

• Scrapping enhanced electronic injury reporting rules;
• Reducing public access to workplace safety data;
• Blocking union representatives from job site visits;
• Weakening heat safety regulations to favor employers;
• Decreasing OSHA workplace inspections and enforcement; and
• Stalling proposed infectious disease protections.

The token changes instituted by the Democratic Party under the Obama and Biden administrations failed to make a significant impact on lowering workplace fatalities, as illustrated by the chart below.

Workers worldwide are facing attacks on wages, safety, and living standards from Wall Street, multinational corporations and far-right governments, such as those led by Trump, Musk and their international counterparts from Milei in Argentina to Meloni in Italy.

To fight against these attacks, workers must organize independently. The International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC) calls for the formation of rank-and-file committees across industries to fight for safe conditions and to challenge the domination of corporate power. Worker safety and well-being must take first priority over the profits of billionaire capitalists.

To learn more about forming a rank-and-file committee at your workplace please fill out the form below.