Florida lawmakers vote to let workers roast in extreme heat
Plus: Congress pumps money into a controversial idea: recycling nuclear waste.
Harold Moran’s bosses are literally sweating him. It's the high season for growing the exotic plants sold as indoor decorations across the cooler parts of the United States. One of his co-workers nearly passed out in the heat on Wednesday. Yet even as South Florida’s temperatures surged near 90 degrees Fahrenheit this week, Moran’s supervisor told him on Thursday that “she didn’t want to see any workers taking any breaks.”
“She wanted us only to work,” Moran, 46, told me on Thursday. “She said the bosses had passed by and saw workers take 30 seconds of time to stand up and take a break, and they didn’t want to see that.”
Relief could be on the way. In a few weeks, Miami-Dade County is on track to enact the first municipal heat protections for workers toiling outside in temperatures that now break records each year. But not if lawmakers in Tallahassee have something to say about it first.
The Republican-controlled state legislature today voted to pass a bill designed to block the county from going forward – and ban any other town or city in the Sunshine State from putting similar heat protections on the books.
“These industries don’t want to give us water, shade or rest breaks, which are essential for our lives,” Moran said. “With all of their millions, they want to use it to block basic protections which we need and which will only make us more productive for them. They have no conscience if they pass this law.”
It’s not like state lawmakers don’t recognize the problem. In 2020, Florida passed a law requiring public schools to provide water and shade at sporting events after a teenage football star died from overheating.
“If these politicians already recognize the crisis of extreme heat for student athletes,” Oscar Londoño, the co-executive director of the South Florida immigrant worker advocate WeCount!, told me, “why don’t they care as much about the outdoor workers who grow their food and build their cities?”
If signed into law, Florida is the second state after Texas to pass such a bill. Only a handful of states mandate heat protections beyond certain temperatures, and efforts to enact more such legislation on the state level have floundered. There’s a federal bill and regulatory push, too, but it hasn’t gone anywhere.
There’s a lot more detail to this story, which I reported with HuffPost’s labor reporter Dave Jamieson, and more harrowing personal anecdotes.
You can read the full story here on HuffPost.
A comeback for nuclear waste recycling?
There’s enough energy contained in the radioactive spent nuclear fuel sitting at atomic power plants across the country to power the United States for a century. But we don’t recycle that nuclear waste.
The U.S. tried before. But Jimmy Carter banned the practice, and the company that was building the first reprocessing plant in South Carolina lost so much money, no one really bothered to try again even after Ronald Reagan lifted the prohibition four years later.
That is, until now. Several nuclear startups are angling to bring nuclear recycling to the U.S. At least two are working with the U.S. government, and one just signed a deal with France’s uranium giant Orano.
Now Congress is offering up to $10 million to help those companies go through the licensing process. It’s a small amount of money, tucked in the spending bill the House passed this week to avert a government shutdown. But experts tell me it’s a major first step.
You can read the full story here on HuffPost.
NEWSLETTER EXCLUSIVE
U.S. Rep. Ama Adams, a Democrat from North Carolina who introduced legislation to enact a national heat standard for workers:
Overheating is one of the most common and most serious dangers in the workplace. Surprisingly, some jurisdictions have very little protections for workers, especially across the hot and humid South.
Many of these workers are paid under the table, susceptible to exploitation, hunger, homelessness, and a lack of healthcare access. Exploitation of workers hurts all of us, because if employers can hire people they can exploit, they won’t hire people they can’t. These protections will benefit all North Carolina workers and all food workers nationally.
Some of these states are even pre-empting local ordinances, forbidding their towns and cities from moving to protect workers from exploitation. Is requiring a glass of water and some shade too much to ask?
Thank you for your time and attention. I hope you felt this newsletter earned it. If not, perhaps this music recommendation will.
It’s called “Pra Ver Você Sambar (CABU Remix)” and it’s by the French-Brazilian-Argentine electronic duo Alligatorz. If you couldn’t guess from the background, it’s an upbeat, housey remix of a bossa nova song. Enjoy.
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Signing off from sunny Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where the state government’s decision to put the military on the subway only adds to the presence we already deal with of constant helicopter and osprey flyovers from Fort Hamilton and the nearby Coast Guard base.