Extreme Heat Safety Regulations For Outdoor Workers
Florida’s outdoor workers, including farmworkers, construction workers, landscapers, and public maintenance crews, face increasing health risks from extreme heat driven by climate change. Florida records some of the nation’s highest rates of heat-related illness and death among outdoor workers.
Yet there is currently no statewide standard requiring employers to provide water, rest, shade, or heat illness training. Florida Democratic state lawmakers have proposed legislation that would provide protections for outdoor workers.
These include mandatory water breaks and cooling periods, along with safety standards ensuring that medical help is provided for workers who are exhibiting heat related symptoms.
The opposite occurred. The Republican super-majority legislature made sure these proposals never made it to the floor of the senate or house for a vote. Instead, a preemption law was passed prohibiting local governments from passing extreme heat protections for outdoor workers.
Today, farmworker groups never engage in legislative advocacy, as there is no doubt doing so would put them in danger of deportation, or target citizen advocates for prosecution. That is one way non-citizens are denied basic rights accorded to them under the U.S. constitution.
U.S. laws protecting farmworkers in particular, have historically centered around refusing farmworkers access to the courts. The Reagan Administration proposed a ten-point “Contract for America”. One of the ten points proposed ending the Legal Services Corporation, specifically because Legal Aid lawyers were representing farmworkers in their fight for fair wages and working conditions. Big agriculture was behind the plan to “zero out Legal Services”.
The compromise to save Legal Services was to forbid its lawyers from representing non-citizens. It worked to save LSC, and deny access to the courts for farmworkers. It is the same strategy we see today: Deny people in the U.S. their constitutional rights, including documented and undocumented workers, another way to chip away at U.S. democracy.
Our elected Democratic state and federal representatives continue to put their own safety in jeopardy by asserting legislative oversight on the activities of ICE, and administration constitutional violations.
As we fight to restore our democracy, the best way we can bring back the ability to pass legislation that protects outdoor workers from extreme heat, is to assert legislative requirements restoring the constitutional rights of non-citizens in the U.S. Lawmakers should continue to advocate for health and safety extreme heat regulations for outdoor workers, as well as policies that reduce GHG emissions that are worsening climate change.