The Florida legislature passed a bill on Friday that prevents any city, county, or municipality in the state from adopting legislation aimed at protecting outdoor workers from extreme heat, prompting many to call out lawmakers for being “cruel” to the “most vulnerable workers”.
Efforts to ensure potentially life-saving water breaks, rest and shade for construction and agriculture workers have failed largely due to industry pressure, a growing trend across south-western states, where heat related deaths are on the rise.
At present, there are no federal standards to protect outdoor workers in the US from heat and humidity – which can be deadly and is getting worse due to global heating. Protections therefore vary greatly from state to state.
The newly passed legislation will affect roughly 2 million outdoor workers across the state and render existing local protections “void and prohibited” from 1 July.
“This legislation is cruel,” said Oscar Londoño, executive director of worker advocacy WeCount!, which has been pushing for a Miami-Dade heat ordinance. “It’s a bad faith attempt to keep labor conditions very low for some of the most vulnerable workers.”
Miami-Dade county has an estimated 300,000 outdoor workers, more than any other county in Florida. Londoño added: “Every single year, it’s going to get hotter and hotter. Many more workers’ lives are going to be at risk. We will see fatalities, because of what Florida Republicans chose to do this week.”
In 2021, the Biden administration ordered Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Osha) to develop workplace heat standards which have not yet been produced, and could take years to do so. This slow process puts even more pressure on state and local governments to enact their own heat regulations.
“So many of our outdoors workers are just looking for some basic safety and guidance,” said Florida state representative Anna Eskamani, who voted against the bill. “We have generations of folks who are experiencing heat stress because they’re outside, kidney failure because there are no bathroom breaks.bathroom breaks. I think preempting [safety requirements] in a state as hot as Florida just doesn’t make sense.”
In 2021, WeCount! launched the ¡Qué Calor! (“how hot”) campaign to secure heat protections for farm workers and construction workers in Miami-Dade county in response to rising temperatures.
Momentum was building, and Miami Dade county was preparing to vote on a heat protection ordinance this month. The vote, which was originally scheduled for November 2023, was postponed due to opposition from industry groups. A few days after the deferral, Florida Republicans filed state legislation to preemptively ban local standards.
Londoño said: “Over the past few months we saw growing industry opposition from billionaire developers, powerful industry associations and their lobbyists who don’t want to see any level of worker progress and advancement in the state.”
The Republican-controlled senate, which usually rails against top-down federal mandates, argued that the legislation will end the state’s “patchwork of regulation”.
Instead, employers will be subject to the federal Osha’s “general duty rule”, which requires employers to provide workplaces that are “free from recognized hazards that are causing or are likely to cause death or serious physical harm”.
Extreme heat is one of those hazards, but across the country it has been rarely enforced.
Marleine Bastien, the commissioner, who co-sponsored the now stalled Miami-Dade heat ordinance, previously told the Guardian that “Workers are at heightened risk for heat related illnesses because it’s compounded when they have to work long hours in brutal Miami heat”.
Proponents of the Miami-Dade heat ordinance followed the lead of Austin and Dallas, the only places in Texas that passed mandatory rest breaks for construction workers, but other localities might not be able to pass such protections anymore. Last summer, Greg Abbott signed a bill deemed by critics “Death Star Law”, which preempts city governments from passing local workplace safety mandates. A district judge ruled that the state law is unconstitutional, but despite that, HB 2127 went into effect on 1 September 2023.
California, Oregon and Washington are the only states that have protections for outdoor workers from extreme heat. Colorado has a heat standard that only applies to agricultural workers, while Minnesota has a standard that only applies to indoor workers. Nevada and Maryland legislatures voted in favor of heat standards, but both bills have since stalled, failing to advance to governors’ desks.
Outdoor workers are experiencing hotter and hotter conditions each year. Between 2011 and 2021, 436 people died due to work-related heat exposure, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, and data on occupational heat injuries and fatalities are likely “vast underestimates”.
People of color are especially vulnerable to extreme heat. More than 40% of all outdoor workers in the US are Black or Hispanic, despite accounting for only 32% of the nation’s population. In Florida outdoor workers include as many as 200,000 migrant farmworkers toiling in the fields, 83,000 landscape gardeners and almost 70,000 construction workers.
“The majority of nursery workers are immigrants like me,” said Sandra Ascencio, 51, who came to Florida from El Salvador and has been working in fields and nurseries in the Miami-Dade area for 20 years, most recently picking tomatoes.
She told the Guardian in November 2023 that she suffered a heat stroke in 2018 and was hospitalized for a week due to intense dehydration: “Once you experience heat stroke, your body is already damaged and every single time you step into the heat, your body reacts because it feels like it’s going to happen to you again.”
Critics have pointed out the hypocrisy in Florida Republicans pushing the legislation, despite passing a measure in 2020 to provide heat protections for student athletes following the heat related death of a high school football athlete.
Jeff Goodell, author of The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet, tweeted: “Insane, inhuman, racist, but not at all surprising. Florida state Senate passing a bill *ensuring* that the heat will kill outdoor workers. This is 19th century stuff, as barbaric as kids working in coal mines.”
Without radical action to curtail heat-trapping greenhouse gas emission, the increased intensity, frequency and geographic spread of extreme heat would cause a three- to four-fold increase in hazardous heat exposure for outdoor workers, according to research by UCS. Previous studies have found that outdoor workers in the US have up to 35 times the risk of dying from heat exposure than the general population.
“It is critical to have heat protection standards in places given summers like last year – especially in places like Florida and Texas – because extreme heat is only going to get more frequent and more severe over time,” said Kristina Dahl, principal climate scientist for the climate and energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS).
