Admire Stewart takes a deep breath and sits still while a breeze hits her face. Her gallon-sized water bottle is by her side.

“Right now I have a migraine because of the heat yesterday and I have heat hives,” she says as she points to the bumps on her arms. She’s trained herself not to scratch them, which only makes them worse.

Stewart works inside Ellicott Hall, one of the unairconditioned dormitories on University of Maryland’s College Park campus.

President Joe Biden introduced an occupational standard for workers laboring in extreme heat, but it could take years to take effect. Meanwhile, states like California, Colorado, Minnesota, Oregon and Washington have passed protections as workers toil in extreme temperatures.

Maryland is set to finalize its heat standard later this summer, making it the first state to do so on the East Coast.

When students leave for the summer, Stewart is one of dozens of housekeepers who clean every inch of the building – doing laundry, waxing floors, and pushing a vacuum through student bedrooms.

When she spoke to a reporter in early June, she said temperatures in the building had already swelled close to ninety degrees.

“I really didn’t finish my assignment yet because I’ve been really slowing myself down a little bit [more] than usual,” she said.

Stewart feels generally supported by her employer to take the measures she needs to keep herself from getting too sick– like slowing down, stopping for water, or just leaving work undone until the worst part of the heat passes.

But many are not so lucky.

Thirty-six U.S. workers died from heat sickness in 2021, the last complete year in which the Bureau of Labor Statistics provided data. That number has grown throughout the last decade and according to independentinvestigations, those are likely undercounts.

In the decade from 2011-2020 there were 34,000 work-related heat injuries and illnesses severe enough that workers had to take time away from the job. It’s likely those numbers are undercounts too, according to the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) because states have varying definitions for heat sickness and most data comes from self-reporting.

State Delegate Lorig Charkoudian, a Democrat, proposed the bill to create Maryland’s heat standard back in 2020.

“We are facing serious impacts from climate change, and it plays out in many ways, harming usually, the most vulnerable communities first,” Charkoudian said.

Occupational safety experts say Maryland is poised to enact one of the most comprehensive standards.

Under the rules, employers will have to post protections in workers’ native languages and provide acclimatization periods so workers can get adjusted to the heat. Workplaces will have to have a written heat safety plan for any work done when the heat index, including humidity, is at 80 degrees or above. That goes for indoor and outdoor work. Additional protocols, like paid mandatory cooled and shaded breaks every two hours, are triggered when temperatures reach ninety degrees.

The incoming standards have received pushback from some industry groups.

Steve Sohasky, who advises construction companies with Creative Risk Management Solutions, says the standard is too extreme and that workers and companies can regulate themselves.

“If people need breaks, they take breaks, you know, we have that flexibility in the job,” Sohasky said after a stakeholder meeting with the Maryland Department of Labor.

Construction workers make up about 6% of the workforce, but according to a National Institute of Health study account for over one-third of yearly heat deaths. Workers of color and immigrants tend to work jobs with the most risk of heat sickness.

Adele Abrams, a labor attorney based in Maryland, says the dangers of working in the heat shouldn’t be minimized.

“I represent employers but I’m not going to sugarcoat this: people die from heat illness. I have had fatality cases I have handled where I know weather conditions were a contributing factor in causing the death of the worker,” she said.

Industry advocates have expressed concerns about the feasibility of setting up cooling and shading stations, especially in jobs where crews are constantly moving. But Abrams says some solutions require planning and creativity. Low-cost options include letting crews sit in a truck with the AC on or setting up a cooling trailer.

Abrams expressed concerns about the patchwork of state protections going into effect as the federal government slowly moves to set its own standards.

“How many times can [employers] reinvent the wheel and re-do their programs?” Abrams said. “This was part of what was making employers crazy back when the COVID regulations were in place…it seemed like every other month we were having to retool it because new information was available or old information was found not to be accurate.”

Anastasia Christman, a policy analyst from the National Employment Law Project, says Congress is notoriously slow in updating laws for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA.

“The public comment period can be made very long, the cost-benefit analysis is very difficult in the case of OSHA, because how do you count the value of injuries that won’t happen? You’re having to sort of count something negative,” Christman said.

Meanwhile, states like Texas and Florida have made it illegal for municipalities to pass their own heat ordinances.

Christman points out that heat, which can cause tiredness or confusion, can be the underlying cause of other incidents like forklift collisions or car accidents on the commute home.

“I think it will be very interesting to see whether or not we see not only a decrease in straight up heat illness, but also a decrease in all these other kinds of injuries. And if in fact, the workplace just starts to become exponentially safer,” she said.

If a federal standard goes into effect, experts say enforcement will still be a challenge. OSHA has fewer than 2,000 inspectors responsible for nearly eight million worksites.

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Japanese stocks ended an already turbulent week in a nosedive, dropping to a six-month low as global funds fled risk and the strengthening yen continued to squeeze speculators out of the so-called carry trade.

The broad Topix benchmark of Japanese stocks, which peaked at an all-time high in mid-July and had been one of the world’s best-performing indices of 2024, fell 5.5 per cent in the first hour of Tokyo trading on Friday.

The sell-off followed a 3.2 per cent fall in the Topix on Thursday and heavy overnight drops on Wall Street led by growing market concerns around the US economy and resilience of the tech sector.

“We haven’t really seen these moves since Covid. Why are they so extreme? Because bad data in the US is now being treated as bad data,” said Takeo Kamai, head of execution services at CLSA in Tokyo. He added that weak economic data was now fuelling recession fears, whereas previously investors took negative US data as a sign that interest rates might come down and boost equities.

“Geopolitics and earnings are playing into this,” said Kamai. “Uncertainty is very high, and people are de-risking.”

The sell-off has been accelerated by heavily leveraged Japanese retail investors rushing to get out of a popular exchange traded fund, the Nomura NF Nikkei 225 ETF, traders said. The ETF fell 9.55 per cent on Friday as individual investors rushed to stem losses.

A 20 per cent plunge in Intel shares after US markets closed spooked Tokyo, where tech and semiconductor names have been among the most attractive to foreign investors.

Bellwether Japanese technology names, led by Tokyo Electron, SoftBank, Lasertec and Advantest all fell heavily in a rout that traders at two Japanese houses said appeared to have been led by large overnight sell orders from European and US long-only funds.

“It’s been a profit-taking frenzy this week. The big funds are taking risk off the table, and Japan is being hardest hit after a very strong run and now a macro backdrop that looks less bright,” said one senior broker at a Japanese securities house. “How long will this go on? We are not seeing signs of strong support here.”

The selling targeted many sectors but hit financials and industrials especially hard. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, the defence contractor whose shares had surged to an all-time high this year and which had been a favourite of foreign investors, has fallen more than 13 per cent this week.

Part of the damage has been the stronger yen, with a chill cast over Japanese manufacturers whose profits are heavily bolstered when the currency is weak, traders said.

The Bank of Japan’s unexpected interest rate increase on Wednesday and the implication that it has entered a rate-raising cycle, even as the US Federal Reserve appears poised to cut rates, has propelled the yen far higher than many had expected.

At Friday’s level of ¥149.6 against the dollar, the yen is now 7 per cent higher than it was in mid-July, and at a level that currency traders said was continuing to deter speculators from the huge bets against the yen that had been built up throughout 2024.

For Japanese stocks, the dollar-yen rate has suddenly switched from tailwind to headwind, hitting exporters and forcing investors into fairly aggressive portfolio restructuring, analysts said.

“We don’t think that the Japan story is broken at this point, but the rules of the game have definitely changed,” said Bruce Kirk, chief Japan equity strategist at Goldman Sachs.

“The way investors have made money from Japan up until now and what will be required to make money from here will be different. So less focus on a narrow group of blue-chip exporters and more work around companies with higher domestic demand exposure.”