Legislators Don't Care if Workers Die

Our legislators did not toil nor spin in the sweltering outdoors when -- in air-conditioned comfort -- they filed, debated, and voted for a bill (HB 433) to block local governments from requiring contractors to provide heat safety measures to protect outdoor workers. Heck, those lawmakers probably never worked up a sweat.

“This shows a callous disregard for human life … outdoor workers are far more vulnerable to extreme heat,” said Jeff Goodell, author of The New York Times climate-change bestseller “The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet.”

These lawmakers are the same sensitive souls who also voted to loosen the laws on child labor although lawmakers agreed to a scaled-back version. Get those teenagers out there on the construction site! Make ’em perspire!

Picture a bunch of sunburned high school kids laboring outdoors for hours in the heat before they go start their homework. This is not likely to improve their awful SAT scores.

It was a member of an organization called Florida Student Power who broke down crying during a House Commerce Committee hearing on the bill during this year’s legislative session.

“To me this bill is not about numbers, it’s about millions of Floridians and it is very personal,” said Laura Munoz, who testified that her father died in a workplace accident related to years of poor heat protections. “How much profit was worth his life, and how much profits are worth their lives? Because I don’t think there’s money enough to ever be worth it.”

Our legislators’ insistence on deleting references to climate change from state law now seems more sinister than silly. It’s like they’re removing clues from a crime scene to hide what they’re doing to working Floridians.

Our spring weather right now is pleasant. But remember last summer? We suffered a heat wave the likes of which the world had never seen before. July 4 was the hottest day in human history, but it didn’t end with the summer.

“In Florida, 2023 was the hottest year on record for many locations, based on annual average mean temperatures,” the Florida Climate Center reported in December. “This includes Pensacola, Daytona Beach, Orlando, Tampa, Lakeland, Venice, Fort Myers, Miami, and Key West, all with a 60-year instrumental record or longer. Many other locations had one of their top five hottest years on record.”

These hot days and nights are increasing, too. According to Miami-Dade County’s website, “Since 1970, Miami-Dade County has had an average increase of days above 90°F from 84 to now 133 days per year, which will continue to rise.”

Working in all that heat is bad for the human body. A University of Florida study released three years ago found that between 2010 and 2020, there were 215 heat-related deaths in Florida.

Two years ago, I interviewed a Florida State University professor named Christopher Uejio, who studies the health impacts of climate change.

“Extreme heat is really insidious,” he told me. “It affects a wide range of bodily functions. It makes your heart pump harder. With your respiratory system, it makes breathing harder. And when you’re breathing in hot air, that makes your respiratory system work harder, too.”

As Grist pointed out, Florida’s lawmakers are well aware of the damage heat can do to a body. Four years ago, faced with a grieving mom talking about her child’s death from heat stroke after football practice, they passed a law to protect student-athletes from experiencing it.

But adults? As Willy Wonka put it so well: “You get nothing! You lose! Good day to you, sir!”

“It is an abomination that hundreds of thousands of workers in Florida continue to risk their lives by working in dangerous heat without relief. And the fact that lawmakers will not act to protect those workers’ lives is simply unconscionable,” said Gerardo Reyes Chavez of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, which has negotiated with employers to create the strongest heat protections in America.

There were people building houses and stores, picking up garbage, fixing phone lines, working on boats, staffing the theme park rides, renting out cabanas at the beach, cleaning pools, taking your order at Chick-fil-a and picking vegetables. One estimate I read said 2 million people in Florida work outdoors, but that number seems low to me.

Unlike our fine legislators, these folks can’t do their jobs in air-conditioned comfort. They must do it while dealing with solar power shining down on their bodies.

Goodell contends that the disregard our constantly cooled politicians feel for these folks is rooted in one simple fact: “They’re brown people.”

For instance, the Florida Health Department reports that “150,000 to 200,000 migrant and seasonal farm workers and their families annually travel and work in Florida.”

Of course, that number maaaay have declined after the Legislature passed that rabidly anti-immigrant law last year — you know, the one that three lawmakers swore up and down was just political theater.

I disagree with him on this. I don’t think the politicians’ disdain is race-based. I think it’s all about class. These workers aren’t the wealthy folks that make campaign contributions. That means the politicos don’t see them as worth protecting. Our lawmakers seem far more interested in protecting the corporations that employ them.

When the bill came up in one House committee, the lobbyists who’d lined up to support it included well-dressed mouthpieces from the Association of Builders and Contractors, the Florida Farm Bureau, the Florida Home Builders Association, the National Utilities Contractors Association, and the Florida Fruit and Vegetable Association.

After last year’s heat wave, advocates from a group called WeCount!, which works for better living and working conditions for immigrants, swung into action. They prodded the Miami-Dade County Commission to consider passing Florida’s first ordinance that would require heat protections for outdoor workers.

As first proposed, Miami-Dade would require construction and agriculture companies with five or more employees to guarantee workers access to water and give them 10-minute breaks in the shade every two hours on days when the heat index hits 90 degrees. Employers would also train workers to recognize the signs of heat illness, administer first aid, and call for help in an emergency.

Two days after the Miami-Dade ordinance was first introduced, Republican State Rep. Tiffany Esposito of Lee County proposed HB 433 to squash it.

Meanwhile, industry groups went to work on the commissioners and got these common-sense rules (ahem!) watered down (pause here for readers’ eyes to stop rolling). Then they persuaded commissioners to postpone their vote so the Florida Legislature could complete its dirty deed, effectively killing and burying Miami-Dade’s ordinance, which it was forced to withdraw last month.

But before that happened, some lawmakers admirably expressed their outrage.

“We’re saying we don’t mind people dying,” said a clearly horrified Rep. Dotie Joseph, D-North Miami.

No one told her she was wrong.

Craig Pittman is a native Floridian and 30-year veteran of the Tampa Bay Times. He’s also an award-winning author of "Oh, Florida!" "The Scent of Scandal," "Manatee Insanity," “Cat Tale,” and “The State You're In: Florida Men, Florida Women, and Other Wildlife.” He currently co-hosts a podcast called “Welcome to Florida.”