The D.C. law firm that Mayor Brandon Scott hired to investigate safety practices after a sanitation worker died of heat stroke specializes in representing companies involved in mining, oil and gas, chemical manufacturing and other areas as they try to avoid running afoul of workplace safety laws.

Conn Maciel Carey LLP touts its “unique relationships with the key regulators” as its team of lawyers – “the deepest bench in the country” – assists companies as they navigate legal issues around employee safety.

On one of the most contentious of these issues, the effort to create a national standard to protect millions of workers from the deadly effects of extreme heat, the law firm has played a key role representing the companies pushing back against it.

“My question is why the city of Baltimore would hire them?” said Jordan Barab, who served as a deputy assistant secretary at the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) between 2009 and 2017.

“There’s got to be hundreds of good, decent consulting firms you could hire that aren’t in the middle of the political controversy over the weakening of federal standards,” said Barab, who now writes a newsletter about workplace safety and labor issues...

Their efforts have already resulted “in direct changes to regulatory language and decisions by OSHA…as well as industry carve-outs and important exemptions,” the company notes in its blog...

The stakes were made starkly clear in Baltimore on August 2 when Ronald Silver II, a Department of Public Works employee, died at the end of his workday staffing a trash truck after collapsing on a woman’s doorstep begging for water.

The temperature that day hit 99 degrees, with humidity sending the Heat Index into the triple digits and prompting the city to declare Code Red conditions.

His death from heat stroke came just days after the latest of several reports by the Baltimore Office of the Inspector General about chronic poor working conditions for city sanitation workers, particularly the failure by DPW to provide working air conditioning and cold water at its sanitation yards...

The lawyer for Silver’s family, Thiru Vignarajah, has questioned why the city is hiring the firm when investigations were already underway by the Maryland Occupational Safety and Health Administration (MOSH) and Baltimore Police...