GOP Now Wants To Ban Water Breaks For Outdoor FL Workers

Dozens of outdoor workers die every year in the state of Florida due to the heat, but that fact didn’t stop lawmakers in the state from passing legislation that actually BANS mandatory water breaks for workers. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Dozens of outdoor workers die every year in the state of Florida due to heat. But the fact didn't stop lawmakers in from passing legislation that actually bans mandatory water breaks for workers. I've got Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins with me to talk about this. Farron, you're gonna have to take this story because I read it and I swear I'm not joking, I thought that this was Onion. I thought that this was some type of comedy story, some Onion story where they're trying to say, has it really gotten that crazy? Talk about this.

Unfortunately, it really has gotten that crazy here in the state of Florida, because yeah, the state legislature, the state House, state Senate worked together and passed this legislation saying that we are going to ban any city, or locale, municipality, whatever it is, you cannot enact any law that says your outdoor workers have to have mandatory water and rest breaks, which means mandatory breaks in the state of Florida for these outdoor workers are officially illegal. You cannot mandate those breaks in the state.

In other words, you would've counties that would say, look, you've got workers coming in and they're picking citrus. They gotta have so much time because it's 120 degrees in those fields or wherever it might be, picking strawberries, construction workers on top of houses, putting on roofs.

And it has to vary county by county, especially here in Florida, because we do have such wild weather, depending on where you are in the state, we're very different.

I really, I'm serious when I tell you that when I read this, I couldn't make sense of it. That's how bizarre this is to me. Can you make sense of it?

No. And that is what is confusing about it is what's the motivation behind this?

Texas did it.

I know and Texas is almost even worse than Florida in terms of working outdoors in the heat. The only thing I can come to the conclusion of is that this is a group of individuals who passed this bill that have never actually had to work outside in the state of Florida, other than maybe cutting their own grass every couple of weeks. They're not people that have actually gone out and done the work. And to be honest, I think that is a big problem with politics in general, whether it's local, state, federal level, is we need more people that have actually gone out there and worked manual labor jobs. We need people that understand what it's like to struggle and can bring that experience to politics. Because if you've never experienced it, you can't appreciate it and understand it. And that's what's happening.

It's bigger than that to me. It's bigger than that to me, Farron. Who would say, I'm gonna put my name on this? I'm gonna vote for this? You understand, it's that you're saying you cannot take a break in 120 degree heat, working on top of a roof. You can't have a special cooling break. Now, here's the real problem. The real problem is that administration after administration has been telling OSHA, do something about this kind of thing. You can do it. If you're OSHA, you can come up and this has been kicking around for what, three presidents, where three presidents have been saying if you don't get OSHA to do their job, because now they're owned by corporations, you know. I mean, corporations own OSHA. OSHA is useless. But they would at least say to these folks at OSHA, come up with some standards that you can enforce. Right now, there are no standards. So it allows these folks to write this kind of legislation. Right?

Yeah. And in their legislation, I will say that they do point out like, hey, we're gonna defer, follow the federal regulations on this. But they added that knowing there's no federal regulations on this.