‘It’s become unbearable’: Texas workers toil through extreme heatwave
Last week as the heat dome scorched Texas, Gloria Machuca arrived for work at a McDonald’s in Houston to find the air conditioning wasn’t working. The temperature inside the restaurant was similar to the temperature outside – at least 90F. It was 7.30am..
Temperatures would rise another 10 degrees that day but already, Machuca said, the intense heat was making her eyes burn. She and five of her co-workers walked out on their jobs.
A third week of a record-breaking heatwave has placed at least 40 million people in the US under heat alerts, with numerous Texas cities experiencing unprecedented heat.
Many workers in Texas and throughout the southern US currently have no heat protection while working outdoors, exposed to the sun and intense, prolonged heat.
“When I came in, it really was so hot. I decided I need to go on strike. I told my co-workers because it is way too hot here and I knew they were all extremely hot as well,” said Machuca. “If we don’t work, they don’t make money. They’re making money off our sweat and it’s not fair,” she said. “It’s time they truly value us.”
Marsam Management, which operates the McDonald’s store in Houston, said in a statement: “As soon as we learned that one of our three air conditioning units had malfunctioned, we immediately brought portable air coolers and fans into the kitchen while technicians made their repairs, which were completed that same day.”
But workers went on strike again on 27 June to demand a permanent fix to the air conditioning issues and workers walked out at a second McDonald’s location in Houston over the same issues – air conditioning not working properly.
“I couldn’t take the heat any more. It was way too hot inside and I said I have to do something because they’re not listening to us,” said Marina Luria Ramírez, a McDonald’s worker at the second location who walked out. “It’s almost like you’re being choked, it’s such a horrible feeling. And there’s times where I feel like I’m going to faint and I try to drink water but sometimes our mouths are so dry, like even water doesn’t work. We try anything we can to recover but it really is a physically tolling and despairing experience.”
For some, it has been a fatal experience. Last week, 66-year-old Eugene Gates, a postal service worker in Texas, collapsed and died after passing out during his mail route.
Gathering data on heat-related deaths is difficult but according to Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Osha) data on worker fatalities, at least five workers in Texas died in 2022 due to heat exposure. In one case a 24-year-old landscaping worker who was experiencing heatstroke symptoms had the police called on him after he became combative. He passed out and later died in a hospital due to severe heat stroke.
Despite the heatwave, Texas’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, recently signed a state bill that nullifies local city ordinances enacted by the cities of Austin and Dallas that require 10-minute water breaks for construction workers every four hours.
“We really do need those breaks. This country is growing and it’s moving because we are out there and if we don’t go out there to keep working, buildings and homes are not going to be built, so there has to be a raising of awareness of what is going on with workers. We’re the ones who are out there really daring to work under these extreme conditions.” said Karla Perez, a construction worker in the Dallas, Texas, area. “It has been pretty difficult to be out there working under this heatwave. It’s become unbearable.”
Perez explained in construction, workers are either working outside in direct exposure to the heat or in homes under construction where there is no air conditioning.
“We’re sweating a lot, we’re getting dehydrated, and we always have
to be drinking either some water or something cold in order to be able to continue working,” added Perez. “I have personally lived it and I have also seen some co-workers that have gone through heat illness and it’s a situation that makes you feel desperation. You start sweating a lot. Sometimes you get physically ill, you feel like vomiting, you feel dizzy, you have diarrhea, your legs start shaking and it’s really a horrible situation because you can only take a break for 10 or 15 minutes when you start feeling like that and then you have to keep working because it is very rare that there are bosses who will tell you, OK, you’re having these symptoms so you should probably go home or you should go get that checked out.”
Daniela Hernandez, state legislative coordinator for the Workers Defense Project, a workers’ rights organization, in Texas, explained that Abbott’s bill will nullify heat protection ordinances in Austin and Dallas.
She noted a bill, HB4673, introduced in the Texas legislature that would have created a council to develop the state’s first-ever heat illness prevention standards never received a hearing.
“Construction workers in both of those cities realized they had a right to a rest break. They were watching their colleagues pass out due to heat illness, some of them were even experiencing it themselves. They realized that these weren’t safe conditions to be working in and fought and advocated for their very rights of a 10-minute rest break every four hours and that was the whole reason why these ordinances came into place,” said Hernandez. “We’re very concerned that with the rollback of these ordinances, we’ll have more workers experience heat illness and potentially die.”