Originally published at: Texas worker died of heatstroke as foreman accused him of being on drugs | Boing Boing
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I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that the majority (61%) of Texan construction workers are Hispanic. Hispanics Comprise 61% of the Construction Workforce in Texas | Eye On Housing
ETA:
It was the fixation of businessmen that the W.P.A. did nothing but lean on shovels. I had an uncle who was particularly irritated at shovel-leaning. When he pooh-poohed my contention that shovel leaning was necessary, I bet him five dollars, which I didn’t have, that he couldn’t shovel sand for fifteen timed minutes without stopping. He said a man should give a good day’s work and grabbed a shovel. At the end of three minutes his face was red, at six he was staggering and before eight minutes were up his wife stopped him to save him from apoplexy. And he never mentioned shovel-leaning again. I’ve always been amused at the contention that brain work is harder than manual labor. I never knew a man to leave a desk for a muck-stick if he could avoid it
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John Steinbeck
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The only better outcome for Abbott and his fellow Republicans would be if the construction worker had been under age 18.
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The governor, Greg Abbott, recently signed a law that forbids local government from enacting heat protection standards for construction workers and lifting whatever standards had already been imposed.
I know that “the cruelty is the point”. This law strikes me as particularly sociopathic and EVERYONE involved in enacting it, construction industry lobbyists, elected officials, their staffers, writers of favorable editorials, and anyone along the way who didn’t say, “this is an obvious moral wrong”, should be made to do manual labor in 100 degree heat for the rest of their brief natural lives.
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This hasn’t made the Dallas Morning News yet. I guess it needs more internet exposure to bring it up as a serious topic in Texas.
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FWIW (and this isn’t a defense of the ban on ordinances) San Antonio never had an ordinance about water breaks to ban. This probably is going to happen a lot before the economic pressure of lawsuits prompts companies to change and/or people write new laws. I noticed people are using this fact to pretend that this has nothing to do with the political side of the law but it really does because I do very much believe that law was enacted to prevent cities in the future from writing ordinances to protect workers during the rise in summer temperatures that everyone knows and knew were coming.
If it’s hot enough to melt infrastructure it can probably kill a few people.
Therefore IMO this law was passed to purposely ensure that worker protections would only be provided once enough people had died to sue companies into deciding to improve safety standards so that the construction boom could max profits at the cost of human lives for a bit longer.
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It is apparent to many by now that Texas considers Hispanic immigrants who are doing all this strenuous labor as expendable and easily replaceable. much like the attitude towards the chinese workers back when the railroads were built. How else to explain Abbot’s cruel and indecent law? Why should any of these poor workers get any relief when Tx knows there are thousands more who will take these jobs? Abbot should roast in hell. See if he gets a f**kin water break there.
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Abbot signed the law, but he didn’t manufacture it out of whole cloth. He is not a single, monolithic, black and white evil. That the bill even got to his desk is the product of a much larger and thereby darker inhumanity.
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no argument there. But he signed it, so he’ll have to be the face of it going forward.
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Wait, really?! That’s cartoonishly evil, even by Republican standards. I can’t even process why they would do that.
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It’s part of the state GOP war against the liberal municipalities in the state. They’ve been grabbing local political power hand-over-fist in the name of “uniform business regulation.” In reality, they don’t want Austin, Houston, Dallas (to a lesser extent) or any of the small liberal cities making life easier for any marginalized group.
Particularly Austin. They, and Abbott in particular, hate Austin
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abott, that foreman, and the foreman’s boss should be dumped in the middle of a texass desert to fend for themselves.
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