The differences between Democrats and Republicans, between Biden and Trump, could not be starker than when it comes to protecting Americans—in their homes, on their jobs, in the outdoors. Sadly, a little 10-year-old boy from Missouri died yesterday hiking in Phoenix’s South Mountain Park, one of the largest city parks in the world. At more than 16,000 acres, it’s a huge municipal playground with miles and miles of trails, and you can get lost in the fifth largest city in the country.
It was also 113 degrees when the family was hiking at 2 p.m., even though the park posts “excessive heat” warnings and closes trails during the day. I’ve worked with Arizona’s parks at city, state, and federal levels, and dehydration is the Number One cause of death. Visitors who haven’t experienced 110 to 118, which is typical most summers, often underestimate how much water they’ll need. It drives me crazy to see tourists in July hiking with a plastic bottle of water. While beautiful, the desert can be lethal.
So if it’s dangerous to hike or even walk outside, imagine working in those conditions. Imagine being a roofer, landscaper, field worker, or part of the crew that paves streets with boiling macadam. Yes, we have laws that allow workers to start early (ah yes, the leaf blower at 4:30!), but Phoenix’s overnight lows are the highest they’ve ever been, so it never cools off, and by 8 a.m. it’s more than 90 degrees. Last summer the city set a new record: the most 110+ days in a row: 54. Of course, most landscapers, window washers, lettuce pickers, and others don’t work from just 4 a.m. to 7 a.m., so there must be protections as the day heats up.
You’d think so, but some places don’t make it easy to provide those protections. Two other hot and humid states, Florida and Texas (why are we not surprised?), even passed laws that prohibit municipalities from requiring employers to provide water and breaks for outdoor workers (like Georgia outlawed giving water to voters). Sick. Inhumane. Republican. But I repeat myself.
Last year the City of Phoenix did mandate heat-related policies for its own employees and contractors, and the city established more relief stations for the homeless, but Phoenix is only one blue bubble among 60 other municipalities in Maricopa County, and most of them have no weather-related regulations. The result was that nearly 650 people died in the county last year from heat-related causes, and most were people Republicans don’t give a rat’s ass about:
A disproportionate number of these victims are lower-income, unhoused, members of minority communities or otherwise disadvantaged individuals, including many who work grueling outdoor jobs in farm fields or on construction sites, or indoors in overheated warehouses.
On Tuesday President Biden specifically mentioned Phoenix when he announced new heat-related guidelines that would affect approximately 36 million workers nationwide. He reminded us that “More people die from extreme heat than floods, hurricanes and tornadoes combined.” Unlike those other weather-related tragedies, most heat deaths, like that little boys’, are preventable. President Biden is in the prevention business to save lives; Project 2025 wants out of the prevention business because it’s a threat to the bottom line.
The draft OSHA policies would require trainings, prevention plans, better worker monitoring and communication, and of course adequate water, shade, and breaks. That’s Strike One against the protections passing this Congress because the plan includes regulations, a word that makes Republicans toss their ketchup. Project 2025 is all-in on dismantling the regulatory state, and Leonard Leo and his corporate pimps got an attaboy from the Supreme Court last week when it neutered agency authority to make and enforce regulations. In two rulings this past week the Supreme Court said the president can kill but he can’t order Exxon to stop killing.
Strike Two is that President Biden couched his comments, appropriately so, in a climate change context, because the temperatures we’re used to and have prepared for are coming to a town near you, thanks to decades of relative inaction on climate (brought to you by the fossil fuel industry’s political donations and lies). The 2021 heat dome in the Northwest, where they’re certainly not prepared for triple digits, killed 80 people, and other regions of the country regularly set new heat records. It seems every year is “the hottest year on record.”
“Ignoring climate change is deadly, dangerous and irresponsible,” the President said. His plan provides billions to help communities prepare for heat disasters, update building codes, and improve energy efficiency, especially for air conditioning.
The administration’s Inflation Reduction Act also addressed these concerns; of course, every congressional Republican voted against that measure. So even while an estimated 2,300 Americans died last year from extreme heat, and we know of simple, cost-effective steps to save lives, billionaire Republicans who complain they’re already over-regulated don’t believe it’s their job, or the government’s job, to protect Americans. Workers are dispensable, and government’s only job is to protect corporations from Biden’s “dictatorial” regulations, according to North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum. Which leads to bullshit like this:
“If Joe Biden cared about the environment, he would stop jetting his wife across the country and lighting money on fire to bolster his flailing campaign that has him losing in his own internal polls,” Republican National Committee Chair Michael Whatley said.
This ass boil Whatley never mentions President Biden’s OSHA proposal, he doesn’t even acknowledge the thousands of heat-related deaths that have occurred, he never says climate change is a thing (for him it isn’t), and he has no solutions to offer because he doesn’t see a problem. He just doesn’t care. So he makes a lame-ass personal attack on the President and his wife, which is all we’re going to get from Trump and the GOP while the planet burns.
You can bet: if elected this orange turd and his fascist enablers will roll back the already inadequate climate regulations that are on the books. That’s not me talking, that’s spelled out in the pages of Project 2025. And you can forget about requiring employers to provide workers water and shade, or give a break to that construction laborer when it hits 115.
Some of us read Charles Dickens and are appalled and angered by the workplace conditions. Others see a business model, one that kills people and the planet.