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President Donald Trump’s nominee to head the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) comes from a background including safety leadership roles at UPS and Amazon—and has the Teamsters and one of its internal reform movements divided on what to think.
The Teamsters applauded the nomination of David Keeling to join the Department of Labor, where he would serve as assistant secretary of labor to Lori Chavez-DeRemer. Both nominees still need to be confirmed for their positions.
“OSHA and the DOL, under the leadership of soon-to-be Secretary Chavez-DeRemer, will continue to benefit from leaders who started in the trades and understand the risks facing working Americans today and necessary reforms and opportunities to protect them,” the Teamsters said in a statement Friday.
Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), a grassroots rank-and-file movement of thousands of Teamsters members, did not share as glowing of an opinion as the wider union.
“Teamsters know bosses rarely care about our safety. OSHA is already too weak and toothless,” the movement said. “Now more than ever, we need to fight for ourselves.”
In the role, Keeling is expected to carry out OSHA’s mission to assure safe and healthy working conditions across U.S. workplaces and enforce whistleblower statutes and regulations.
“I want to express my heartfelt gratitude to President Trump for nominating me to be the next OSHA administrator at the U.S. Department of Labor,” Keeling said in a statement posted on LinkedIn.” It is an incredible honor, and if confirmed, I am excited about the opportunity to work with Secretary Chavez-Deremer and Deputy Secretary Keith Sonderling to further OSHA’s mission to enhance workplace safety and health.”
Keeling started his career as a part-time package handler at UPS before spending more than 20 years with the courier, most recently serving as vice president of global health and safety at the company until July 2021.
From there, he hopped over to Amazon where he was the director of road and transportation safety for two years. Since June 2023, Keeling has worked as an independent environmental health and safety consultant.
Both UPS and Amazon have had scuffles with OSHA in the past.
In 2019, OSHA accused UPS of forcing its drivers to work in excessive heat with no air conditioning, a nugget TDU called out in its statement on the appointment. That same year, UPS was also cited for fire hazards at packaging facilities.
The delivery company capitulated in its new five-year deal with the Teamsters signed in 2023, introducing air conditioning in its brown delivery vans for the first time.
UPS is still currently locked in a legal battle with the agency over efforts to install heat-stress monitoring devices in its trucks, with UPS saying OSHA lacks the authority to do heat-stress searches.
Amazon reached a settlement with the agency in December to institute new ergonomic safety procedures at its facilities nationwide. OSHA had previously slapped Amazon with 10 citations, but agreed to withdraw nine of those claims after the e-commerce giant forked over $145,000 in fines.
On top of the payout, the federal settlement requires Amazon to allow OSHA authorities to complete monitoring inspections at the warehouses where it initially cited the now-dropped hazards.
New York still has a separate state OSHA investigation currently looking into Amazon, and whether the company has been working to hide its injury rates at its warehouses. The investigation overlapped with a Senate probe in December, which found that Amazon has been muddying injury rates at its warehouses to make them seem safer than they are.
Amazon denied the findings in the report, pushing back at the investigation and rejecting results that it called “fundamentally flawed.”
Nonprofit workplace safety advocate The National Safety Council welcomed Keeling’s nomination, calling him a friend of the council and highlighting that his real-world floor experience “will be a boon” to the government agency.
Another nonprofit, progressive consumer rights advocacy group Public Citizen, wasn’t as impressed.
“Unfortunately, being associated with corporations cited for frequent violations does not make Keeling qualified to run OSHA,” said Robert Weissman, co-president of Public Citizen, in a statement. “Keeling’s work history with Amazon and UPS was marked by frequent citations for workplace safety and health violations.”
Under Keeling, there’s a high chance protective regulations will be rolled back, in what has become a Trump administration trademark. As seen in areas such as climate and Big Tech deregulation and the recent cuts to the federal government by the Department of Government Efficiency, the new administration is expected to lean further into deregulation within OSHA.
While OSHA’s first nationwide proposal to establish a heat-stress standard will likely be delayed, its final “walkaround” rule that allows OSHA inspectors to be accompanied by non-employee worker representatives may be withdrawn altogether. Business groups filed a lawsuit to block the latter, claiming it exceeded the agency’s authority.
