As part of a broader deregulatory push by President Donald Trump and his allies in the business community, the Trump administration is pushing to weaken an area of worker safety law that could make it easier for employers in the entertainment and sports industries to evade responsibility for a worker’s injury or death on the job.
A new rule proposed by the current leadership of the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health administration, an agency that oversees workplace health and health regulation, would weaken what’s known as OSHA’s “general duty clause,” which is used to apply to cases of workplace injuries and deaths where no other specific standard applies.
This general duty clause, for instance, has been used to cite employers for heat-related death and illness on the job, as well as forms of workplace violence such as physical assault and even homicide. Under this clause, employers are required to provide a workplace that is “free from recognized hazards that are causing or are likely to cause death or serious physical harm.” Courts have interpreted this to include hazards that could have been preventable.
Now, OSHA under the Trump administration is seeking to weaken this clause in the entertainment, performing arts, animal handling, tactical training, hazard-based media and journalism activities, and sports industries specifically — and they have cited an old OSHA case involving SeaWorld Orlando in their push for a change.
See, back in 2010, OSHA cited SeaWorld $70,000 for safety violations following the death of 30-year-old whale trainer Dawn Brancheau on the job. Brancheau, an employee at SeaWorld, was required by her employer to interact face-to-face with a killer whale named Tilikum that was known for previous involvement in human deaths. During a live show one day at the park, Brancheau was tragically, publicly dismembered and drowned by Tilikum in front of an audience of families and children.
OSHA ultimately determined that SeaWorld was aware of the hazards Brancheau faced, and that her death could have been prevented. SeaWorld contested OSHA’s citation — which was ultimately weakened from where it started, anyway — and that case made it to the U.S. Court of Appeals, where the court sided with OSHA in a 2-1 decision.
Who was the lone dissenter? It was none other than then-Judge Brett Kavanaugh, who was later appointed by Trump to the U.S. Supreme Court during Trump’s first presidential term in 2018.
“That is where this all stems from,” said former OSHA official Jordan Barab, who served as second-in-command at OSHA under the Obama administration.
“The intent is to keep OSHA out of enforcement in entertainment and sports venues, at least to the extent that this general duty clause is used,” he told Orlando Weekly in an interview. That means that illnesses and injuries that implicate existing standards — such as adequate fall protection — would still be subject to OSHA enforcement.
But injury or death related to extreme heat would be put in a regulatory gray area.
“If this thing goes through, this action goes through, then it could keep OSHA from enforcing any kind of heat-related protections for performers,” Barab confirmed.
According to the proposed rule, published to the Federal Register on Wednesday, the intent of the rule is to “clarify” OSHA’s general duty clause to “to exclude from enforcement known hazards that are inherent and inseparable from the core nature of a professional activity or performance.”Kavanaugh’s dissent in the SeaWorld case — referred to in the newly published rule — argued that the general duty clause “does not authorize OSHA to regulate hazards arising from normal activities that are intrinsic to professional, athletic, or entertainment occupations.”
So, in other words, he believed those occupations should get, or already had, a special carve-out. Yet, as Barab wrote in his own watchdog blog, Confined Space, at the time, Kavanaugh’s assertion doesn’t hold up. OSHA has, in fact, regulated hazards eligible for enforcement under the general duty clause in these industries before.
In 2011, for example, OSHA used the general duty clause to cite the producer of the Broadway musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark after cast members suffered preventable injuries during aerial routines.
Cirque du Soleil, the largest circus performing company in the world, has been cited by OSHA for safety violations multiple times following performer injuries and death. Disney World also hasn’t been spared by the agency’s labor safety cops.
Even more timely are fines recently levied against producers of Orlando’s Electric Daisy Carnival. EDC producers are facing fines from OSHA in connection to the death of a stagehand that occurred during setup for the music and arts festival last year.
Paul Cox, who serves as acting business manager of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees Local 631 in Orlando, told Orlando Weekly he found OSHA’s new proposal “reprehensible.”
“A stagehand at Walt Disney World should have the same fundamental protections as an auto worker in Detroit,” said Cox. “For far too long, those of us in the entertainment industry have lived by the saying, ‘The show must go on,’ but never should that come at the cost of our safety or our livelihoods.”
According to 2025 employment data cited by OSHA, protections for thousands of U.S. workers in athletics and entertainment industries could be affected (or rather, weakened) should this regulation take effect.
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A broader push for deregulation
This new rule from OSHA is part of a broader deregulatory push from the Trump administration, which has sought from day one of Trump’s presidency to downsize (and fiscally starve) the federal government.
U.S. Department of Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer — a Trump appointee — this week announced her department would be taking 63 deregulatory actions as a sort of patriotic act to free the business community of “unnecessary regulations.”
“The Department of Labor is proud to lead the way by eliminating unnecessary regulations that stifle growth and limit opportunity,” said Chavez-DeRemer, a former Republican congresswoman from Oregon, in a statement. “These historic actions will free Main Street, fuel economic growth and job creation, and give American workers the flexibility they need to build a better future.”
Other deregulatory actions announced this week include proposals to scrap certain affirmative action requirements (“illegal discrimination) for registered apprenticeship programs, rescind union organizing rights for migrant farmworkers, and get rid of minimum wage and overtime requirements for home healthcare workers that were put in place under the Obama administration.
In the DOL’s proposed rulemaking, the DOL warns the latter could “discourage essential companionship services by making these services more expensive.”
For Barab, this new push is just another piece in the puzzle. “There’s a whole pattern here of, you know, trying to not just narrow what kind of authority OSHA has, but attacks on the entire so-called regulatory state,” said Barab.
Former OSHA official Jordan Barab says this is part of a pattern of attacks on the so-called regulatory state.
According to a recent “Death on the Jobs” report from the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest federation of labor unions, OSHA as it stands has only one federal inspector for every 84,937 workers in the U.S.
With nearly 12 million workplaces under its jurisdiction, OSHA only has enough staffing and resources to inspect workplaces once every 185 years, the AFL-CIO calculated.
President Trump, who oversaw a decline in OSHA enforcement activity during his term in the White House, has called for sizable budget cuts to many federal agencies, including OSHA. Cutting OSHA’s budget for investigations and inspections could hit working people in states like Florida even harder, since Florida doesn’t have its own workplace safety agency to fill gaps in federal enforcement.
Barab, who tracks worker deaths each week on his blog Confined Space, believes budget cuts for OSHA are counterproductive — at least if your goal is to protect working people and keep them safe and alive to return home to their families.“Obviously, OSHA needs a much bigger budget, as opposed to the President’s proposal, which cuts OSHA’s budget significantly,” Barab told Orlando Weekly.
“OSHA needs authority to do whatever it can, obviously within the law, to protect workers and not keep restricting OSHA’s authority to protect workers as the founding fathers of OSHA intended when they passed the Occupational Safety and Health Act 50 years ago.”
What’s next?
This proposed rule from OSHA isn’t set in stone — yet. Now that the proposal is published, it is now subject to a 60-day public comment period. Anyone (even you, reader) is welcome to submit a comment in support of, against, or to otherwise add suggestions to help shape the rule.
You can do that by mail or online here.
Since this is a proposed regulation, not a standard, the process for adopting this proposal will take a shorter amount of time than it does to adopt a new standard — take, for example, a Biden-era effort to establish standards for protecting workers from heat-related illness on the job. The process for finalizing that standard is still ongoing.
According to Barab, standards are subject to public hearings under the OSH Act, upon request. Proposed regulations, however, are not. “Regulations are things that are not governed by the Occupational Safety and Health Act. They’re governed by the Administrative Procedure Act, and there’s no requirement in the Administrative Procedure Act for a hearing,” he explained.
After the 60-day comment period, OSHA will review the final comments they receive (which could include comments in support from the industry side, too) and work on finalizing a regulation. Then, the agency will submit that to the U.S. Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs for them to sign and issue.
Barab, however, also suspects the proposed rule may be illegal, arguing that OSHA generally lacks the authority to eliminate general duty clause protection for certain hazards, based on past court decisions. OSHA could, alternatively, be hoping for someone to challenge the new rule in court and see previous court decisions overturned.
This post has been updated to add comment provided post-publication from IATSE Local 631 business manager Paul Cox.
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This article appears in Jul 2-8, 2025.