Blame Biden and the feds for no water breaks
Temperatures in San Antonio rose to 104 on the day before Gabriel Infante died last year. The 24-year-old was working, digging ditches for fiberoptic cable, when he began to act disoriented. He fell twice. His friend began to douse him with water. When the medics arrived, his foreman reportedly insisted that Infante’s symptoms were drug-related. By the time he was rushed to the hospital, his body temperature approached 110.
Now, his mother is suing the construction company for failing to provide a safe work environment and to properly train employees to spot the signs of heat stroke.
This summer, record high temperatures are again imperiling workers. Some 90 million people have been hit by heat waves and domes and all manner of heat shapes. In El Paso, temperatures soared above 100 on
June 16 and stayed there for more than 40 days, smashing the city's previous streak of 23 days. In Laredo, in just a few weeks’ time, 10 people died from heat-related causes. Last year, heat took 306 Texans. How many this year? The problem is deadly and growing more severe, hastened by earth-warping climate change. Extreme heat affects us all.
The solution, at least for workers, seems simple: shade, water, rest. With great fanfare, the Biden administration in 2021 promised action on strengthening heat safety standards for American workplaces and communities.
America is still waiting.
The president seems to be feeling the heat. Thursday, Biden, joined by San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg, announced a slate of new steps from the federal government meant to protect communities from extreme heat, including a promise to ramp up enforcement on lax employers and a new "alert" system to nudge them to do the right thing. The No. 1 weather-related killer is heat, Biden said.
We need more than that, Mr. President. We need federally mandated shade, water and rest breaks for construction workers, landscapers and other laborers exposed to dangerously high temperatures. It’s been years since the agency tasked with protecting U.S. workers, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, embarked on a typically lengthy rulemaking process to strengthen protections for these workers.
Why doesn’t Biden just issue an executive order and get it done? Because it would almost certainly be challenged in the courts, says David Michaels, a professor at the George Washington University School of Public Health and former administrator for OSHA. Texas no doubt would jump on another chance to sue the feds. OSHA could issue an emergency rule on its own, a temporary standard.
But it would likely face the same fate as an executive order.
So what can we do?
Some states have already filled in the gaps with their own regulations but here in Texas, the Legislature has gone in the opposite direction, refusing to pass state protections and even restricting cities from passing their own.
Gov. Greg Abbott has repeatedly said that federal regulations still apply. But that’s little comfort to many since the regulations don’t require any particular action, as Michaels warned the Legislature in a letter. OSHA’s workplace inspections — despite Biden’s boasts Thursday — still are far too rare, and enforcement, if it happens, almost only happens after someone dies. There are essentially no real preventive requirements for employers — no mandates of the things that could’ve saved Infante’s life.
So, while Abbott is to blame for endangering workers, so are the feds.
OSHA is essentially trusting businesses to do the right thing, to treat their employees humanely even if it means temporary loss of productivity or profit. Some will. Perhaps even most will. But some won’t. These are some of the same businesses that insisted modern-day luxuries like air conditioning were weakening workers’ constitutions, as the National Cotton Council of America suggested last year in its comments to OSHA.
Various lawmakers in Congress have taken up the cause over the years, with little success. Still, U.S. Rep. Sylvia Garcia (D-TX) told us she’s still fighting for her Construction Injury Prevention Act that would require 15-minute rest breaks for construction workers every four hours. She’s also joined a letter urging OSHA to speed things up.
More lawmakers must join Garcia and her colleagues. Congress could, according to Michaels, tell OSHA it has six months to deliver a rule, allowing the agency to jump some steps and act quickly on what is clearly a growing emergency. They’ve done it before, he points out, during the peak of the HIV/AIDS epidemic to implement new rules protecting health care workers and patients.
That would be the immediate fix. The longer one, per Michaels, who says he doesn't fault OSHA for the routinely long process, is fixing the rule-setting system altogether so it doesn’t drag on while the world burns. We'll resist the temptation to be that ambitious. We'll just plead with Biden and Congress to issue a swift kick and clear the way for the bureaucrats at OSHA to mandate water, shade and rest for outdoor workers before another life is lost to this brutal heat. And we won’t even insist lawmakers toil outside in triple-digit temperatures while they do so.
Where are the federal protections to ensure safety standards?