David Keeling has been confirmed to lead the Occupational Safety and Health Administration as the assistant secretary of labor. The U.S. Senate voted 51-47 to approved his confirmation, along with a block of dozens of other nominees for other federal agencies, on Tuesday.
Keeling is Amazon’s former director of road and transportation safety, a job he left in mid-2023 to do consulting, according to LinkedIn. He also spent about 36 years working for the United Parcel Service in several regional safety manager and director roles before becoming its vice president of global health and safety.
Keeling is stepping into OSHA’s lead role as the agency works to develop a federal standard meant to protect workers from extreme heat. That draft rule aims to require many employers to provide workers with access to water, rest and shade. A comment period for the rule was recently extended to the end of October.
In his role at OSHA, Keeling has said he will prioritize the perspectives of everyday workers, something he learned during his time at UPS.
“The best source of safety improvements originates with the people who perform the job every day,” he said in prepared remarks during his June 5 confirmation hearing before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.
Under his leadership, Keeling said he would prioritize updating some of OSHA’s “outdated systems and processes,” saying some standards have “become antiquated or unusable in the face of job modernization or technological advancements within the workplace.”
He also believes OSHA would benefit from technology and data collection improvements he said could help better track and measure metrics in an effort to catch safety issues before they cause injuries or death.
“We must take advantage of existing global industry consensus standards which have gone through much more rigorous review, regular updating, and continuous improvement than have many of OSHA’s existing rules,” he said in his remarks.
Some safety advocacy groups, including the Coalition for Workplace Safety and the Associated General Contractors, have praised Keeling’s nomination. The National Safety Council called Keeling “a proven safety leader who will help continue the agency’s long legacy of protecting the health and wellbeing of our workers,” and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, of which Keeling said he was once a member, also applauded his nomination.
Yet others, like the National Employment Law Project, have expressed concerns that Keeling’s background will lead him to side with business interests over stronger safety protections, particularly for heat exposure.
During his confirmation hearing in June, Keeling said he preferred standards be set by an industry, not by the government. He described industry-led standards as having a more rigorous review process and more frequent updates than some standards set by OSHA.
Executives from both UPS and Amazon have lobbied against federal heat rules, the New York Times reported, and both companies have faced recent citations from OSHA for heat-related worker injuries.
