Sweltering summer heat might have been more bearable for outdoor workers in Miami-Dade County under a proposal that suggested mandated breaks in the shade on the hottest days – but Florida said no.
The county’s proposal to establish heat rules for workers has been preempted by a new law: Florida has joined Texas in banning such local rules for outdoor workers. Meanwhile, California, Colorado, Minnesota, Oregon and Washington have passed laws giving more protections to construction workers who work in extreme heat.
Florida’s new law has frustrated and angered some experts and advocates for construction workers and farmworkers. As summers get hotter over the years, outdoor workers will need more protections, not fewer, said Luigi Guadarrama, political director of Sierra Club Florida said.
The law will primarily affect low-income workers of color, Guadarrama said: “Currently, the state legislature has no interest in protecting workers."
Other advocates also say more protections for outdoor workers are needed.
It’s only baffling because of projection.
We all understand others in large part by projection. What’s happening here is decent people are projecting their sense of empathy onto people that do not have the capacity to experience it and being surprised. We need to get it into our heads that these people are not going to see the error in their ways and change. We have to remove them power somehow.
We normally talk about projection when right wingers project their fears, ignorance, and crime onto people not in their in-group but that isn’t the only place it exists.
It’s exactly this. Conservatives have a different brain structures that prevents them from learning empathy in a deep sense. They know they are being cruel but can’t imagine what it would like to be in those peoples’ shoes and so they don’t care.