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Another summer ending with no heat protection for outdoor workers

Labor Day marked the unofficial end of another summer and it could not have come soon enough for the millions of outdoor workers who labor in the Heat which is growing increasingly extreme in recent years.

By August, a record 15 national heat records were broken this year and extreme weather is expected to become more frequent because of climate changes. The result has been heat exhaustion, heat stroke and worsening of existing conditions such as asthma, kidney disease and heart disease, The Guardian reported. Also, every additional 1.8 degrees increases the death rate from heart disease by 2.8 percent, which could triple by 2025.

The risk of death from Extreme Heat generally is highest among African Americans, Indigenous peoples and Alaska Natives, The Guardian said. That is because such populations “are disproportionately exposed to heat based on underlying inequities such as residential segregation in communities with urban heat islands and lack of tree cover and limited resources for cooling such as access to air conditioners and fewer resources – including access to health care – to be treated for and to recover from health-related illness or injury.”

Outdoor workers in industries such as agriculture and construction are especially vulnerable. Public Citizen estimated that heat exposure kills around 2,000 of them and causes about 170,000 heat-stress-related incidents annually.

Florida, which, The Guardian pointed out, is a peninsula state and therefore especially at risk because “its weather is heavily influenced by the rapidly warming oceans.” The result is extreme heat as noted last year when July and August tied for the hottest ever months in the state. Records were broken also in April and May this year, especially in Miami-Dade County.

Still, Florida’s two million outdoor

workers, among them about 300,000 in Miami-Dade, as well as the rest of the 32 million nationally, have had to toil in such extreme heat because employers are not required to provide “protections.”

WeCount, an organization advocating for such protections, spent years trying to persuade the County Commission to require employers to provide relief such as periodic breaks, rest in the shade and access to cool, clean water or face fines, The Miami Herald reported. Last year, the commission began seriously considering a draft heat-protection ordinance – at a time when the temperature exceeded 100 degrees at peak times for 46 days. However, a majority on the commission opposed the draft ordinance and it had to be amended to require only provision of water and rest in the shade and for only six months of the year, averaging five days a week. The draft was most likely weakened because of pressure from business interests.

A month earlier, Jorge Perez, head of the Related Group construction company, and Jose “Joche” Smith of Costa Farms claimed in a joint Miami Herald opinion column that the ordinance was being pushed by “well-funded, politically linked activist organizations.” They argued that the ordinance “would not only duplicate Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) regulations but would also burden our industries with a new set of over-reaching regulations and penalties.” It would also “establish harsh penalties on any construction or agriculture business with five of more outdoor workers, it creates a new county ‘heat police’ department funded by the fines they issue on our companies.”

In any case, that dispute was rendered moot when, this April, Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, signed a bill barring local authorities from doing what Miami-Dade intended. Its passage came on the final day of the legislative session after, The Guardian reported, citing the Orlando Weekly, business interests threatened reper-cussions against legislators. A chamber of commerce lobbyist emailed lawmakers to vote for the legislation, “promising – or threatening – that the vote would count double in the seasonal legislative cards.” That night, a construction industry lobbyist texted “HEAT cannot die” to the House speaker’s chief of staff, meaning the legislation not be blocked.

DeSantis acknowledged that the law was “going to cause a lot of problems in Miami-Dade.” He could have vetoed it but he settled for saying that it did not originate with him. The University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences reported that, between 2010 and 2020, the state had 215 deaths directly related to heat, UPI reported.

Florida is not the only state to enact an anti-heat protection law. In Texas, the governor, Greg Abbott, also signed a “preemption” bill which voided protections already in place in Austin and Dallas. Efforts to enact such laws failed in Virginia and Nevada. Only a handful of states require protections. They include California, which acted in 2006, and Washington and Oregon which did so after several farm workers died in a heat wave in June 2021.

National Public Radio (NPR) noted that – as Perez and Smith in MiamiDade said – the federal government already has guidelines for employers to keep workers safe on the job, including during extreme heat. But the guidelines do not specify what the protections must be or what the heat limits are for them to kick in.

On July 2, the Biden administration introduced a proposed OSHA rule to toughen the guidelines, with President Joe Biden making the announcement during a speech at the Washington, D.C., Emergency Operations Center. He declared that “extreme heat is the number-one weather-related killer in the United States. More people die from extreme heat than [from] floods, hurricanes and tornadoes combined.” The president blamed rising temperatures on global warming and explained that he was taking steps to counter “climatefueled extreme weather events.”

The Biden initiative will, among other things, provide specific safeguards when the heat index at a workplace exceeds 80 degrees. At that point, the employer must provide increased access to water and a temperature-controlled break room, according to The Guardian. At 90 degrees, additional protections have to be implemented, such as 15-minute breaks every two hours, mandatory monitoring of workers and hazard alerts. Employers who fail to meet the rule could be fined thousands of dollars.

If implemented, the OSHA rule will be “the nation’s first-ever federal safety standard addressing excessive heat in the workplace,” the White House said in a statement.

However, the proposed rule will not take effect for years because it is only at the third of seven steps in OSHA’s rule-making process. Also, further delays are likely from possible legal challenges and the rule will likely be scrapped if former president Donald Trump, who is pro-business, wins reelection.

Meanwhile, outdoor workers will have to continue putting their lives at risk and it is evident that more action is needed to protect them than an OSHA rule that is years away and patchwork laws in a handful of states.

The workers themselves have been taking the lead in generating awareness of their plight. Some of them organized a campaign in August in 13 cities to mark “Heat Week” in order “to keep struggling until the right to water, shade and rest is given to all workers in this country,” Lourdes Cardenas, an agricultural worker and member of United Farm Workers told reporters, speaking through a translator, The Guardian reported.

That campaign included organizing workers in agriculture and other sectors for marches and town hall meetings. As a symbolic gesture, workers planned, according to The Guardian, to “take a coordinated drink of water in a display of solidarity aimed at showing the importance of workplace heat safety.”

Most of the agricultural and construction workers are migrants, which could explain why there is no national outcry against the conditions in which they have to pick America’s crops and build America’s homes. But workers in other sectors are also affected, including postal employees who have to deliver mail in vehicles without air-conditioning and those in the airline, fast-food and other industries. What seems to be needed is for Congress to pass laws making the protections being sought a mandatory feature of working during times of extreme heat, especially since all indications are that temperatures are expected to worsen.



This post first appeared on South Florida Times, please read the originial post: here

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Another summer ending with no heat protection for outdoor workers

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