The cruelty is the point.
Ron DeSantis recently secretly signed a Republican bill that voids outdoor worker protections from local governments. Interestingly, the cruel and vicious bill did not originally come from Desantis; instead, it was from the GOP members who have a stranglehold on state politics. In March, DeSantis wanted to ensure the press knew he did not originate the bill. He signed it anyway, hiding in the dead of night with no cameras.
The GOP wanted to snooker Floridians with an old and tried excuse that Texas Republicans had used when they also voided local heat exposure laws. Texas already has heat exposure laws on the books.
The Florida Republicans stated they did not want a patchwork of rules from the state and the feds. They might have had a leg to stand on if these rules were in place in Florida, but they are not. There are no protections for outdoor workers in the state.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration regulates heat exposure only in the general duty category as “free from recognized hazards that are causing or are likely to cause death or serious harm.” That is a lot of wiggle room for the evil MAGA to unleash on workers. But that is not OSHA’s fault. According to reporting from the New Republic, courts frequently tossed out regulatory actions.
Republicans finally recognize the threat posed by climate change. The threat is that rising temperatures will tempt local governments to impose regulations to mitigate the health effects of extreme heat. The state of Florida moved last week to nip that in the bud.
Florida is a very hot place. Indeed, it’s the single hottest state, hotter even than Hawaii and Arizona, according to a research team at Payless Power, a Texas utility company. Like everyplace else, Florida only gets hotter. Since 2009, the average Florida temperature rose from 73.1 degrees to 76.3 degrees. That was bound to provoke labor agitation, and it did. A worker advocacy group in South Florida called We Count! initiated a campaign to require that agricultural and other outdoor workers, many of them undocumented immigrants, be provided sufficient water, shade, and rest.
In response, Miami-Dade County introduced an ordinance creating a heat standard for outdoor workers. The bill raised objections from the Miami-Dade Farm Bureau, which represents growers. “Farming is hard enough as it is,” protested the executive director, Jocelyn Guilfoyle. “The last thing we need is to be subject to the Miami-Dade Heat Police.” To mollify the growers, the county commission agreed to raise the temperature threshold triggering a requirement that employers give their workers water and break periods. It had been 90 degrees; the commission raised that to 95 degrees. The commission also lowered the maximum fine from $3,000 to $2,000.
That didn’t satisfy Florida’s Republican-controlled state government. For once, the impetus to pass a reactionary law did not come from Governor Ron DeSantis, perhaps because he’s no longer running for president. Rather, it came from the state legislature, where Republicans hold a supermajority. The bill’s sponsor in the Florida House, Tiffany Esposito, said at a hearing for the legislation that “if you want to talk about health and wellness, and you want to talk about how we can make sure that all Floridians are healthy, you do that by making sure that they have a good job. And in order to provide good jobs, we need to not put businesses out of business.”
The world’s climate has changed. Extreme heat is now common in many places in the Northern Hemisphere, and ocean temperatures are breaking records almost daily, monthly, and yearly. Summer hasn’t even arrived yet, and heat waves have already occurred. Those in Florida can walk inside their air-conditioned home or into the office. Agricultural, construction, air conditioning repair, and electrical and cable workers can not do it. Only four states have outdoor worker regulations on their books: California, Colorado law only for farm workers, Washington, and Oregon, according to Time Magazine.
“Outdoor workers are all around us — working on construction sites, repairing and paving roads, picking fruit and vegetables on farms, and more. They’re just trying to make a living for their families — and instead of putting protections in place to ensure businesses are prioritizing their workers’ health and well-being from record-setting temperatures, we tied the hands of proactive local governments to do so,” Torres added.
“It wasn’t anything that was coming from me. There was a lot of concern out of one county, Miami-Dade. And I don’t think it was an issue in any other part of the state. I think they were pursuing something that was gonna cause a lot of problems down there, so I think a lot of the members of the Dade delegation created that just to steer clear of those problems,” Ron DesantisThe move is “not only an injustice for the thousands of outdoor workers who are asking for the bare minimum in triple-digit heat, but it’s also an afront to decency and humanity,” said Esteban Wood, policy director for WeCount!, representing immigrant communities, which led opposition to the bill.
“Workers who are simply asking for 10 minutes of a shaded rest break, simply asking for rest breaks on a job — to deny workers that is simply outrageous,” Wood added. “Extreme heat kills.”
“It’s no surprise that Gov. DeSantis signed this cruel and terrible bill late at night; that’s what you do when you’re embarrassed about what you’re signing,” said Jessica E. Martinez, co-executive director of the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health (COSH), a labor-oriented organization.
Meanwhile, after Desantis signed the potential death sentence for outdoor workers, the Department of Labor cites a sugarcane company in Palm Beach County over the death of a twenty-six-year-old Mexican man legally in the country on a temporary farm worker permit. He died in a sugarcane plantation.
From the US Department of Labor:
FORT LAUDERDALE, FL – Making the trip from Mexico to South Florida, a 26-year-old man arrived in September 2023, ready to start a new job on a sugar cane farm in Belle Glade. Four days later, he suffered fatal heat-related injuries while working in an open field as the heat index reached 97 degrees.
An investigation by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration found that McNeill Labor Management Inc. of Belle Glade, the farm labor contractor who hired the young man under the federal H-2A program for temporary or seasonal nonimmigrant workers, could have prevented his death by implementing safety rules to protect workers from heat-related hazards. These include using an effective plan to help workers acclimate to the weather conditions.
OSHA investigators learned the worker, sitting atop stacks of sugar cane on a trailer as he tossed them to the ground for planting, began experiencing symptoms consistent with heat-related illness and complaining of not feeling well. Shortly after, he collapsed.
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“This young man’s life ended on his first day on the job because his employer did not fulfill its duty to protect employees from heat exposure, a known and increasingly dangerous hazard,” explained OSHA Area Director Condell Eastmond in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. “Had McNeill Labor Management made sure its workers were given time to acclimate to working in brutally high temperatures with required rest breaks, the worker might not have suffered a fatal injury.”
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After its investigation, OSHA cited McNeill Labor with one serious violation for exposing workers to hazards associated with high ambient heat while working in direct sunlight. Federal investigators also found that the employer did not report the worker’s hospitalization or eventual death, both of which the law requires be reported. McNeill Labor Management faces $27,655 in proposed penalties, an amount set by federal statute.
The company is contesting the findings before the independent Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission.
Based in Belle Glade, McNeill Labor Management provides contract laborers for nursery cleanups; harvesting, packing and stacking for corn and cabbage farms; and cane planting and cutting in sugar cane fields in agricultural markets throughout the U.S.