Living in my adopted state of Florida, I have become accustomed to heat warnings and the local radio station providing advice on how to keep kids from being killed by the heat. Based on my own experience as a runner and doing work outside in the summer, I know that the Florida heat and humidity quickly take a toll. This is also backed up by science and anyone who doubts the effects of heat can do a proof by heat suicide test, which I recommend against for obvious moral and practical reasons.
Florida and other states are experiencing what was once considered unusual heat and a few years ago Miami-Dade County considered a rule that would require 10-minute shade and water breaks for outdoor workers on very hot days. Recognizing the danger, the state legislature leapt into action, passing House Bill (HB) 433 which forbids cities and counties from enacting local laws requiring employers to provide heat exposure protection to outdoor workers. As would be expected, the state legislature did not pass any statewide laws protecting workers and deferred to the federal OSHA regulations. Unfortunately for workers, OSHA currently lacks specific heat regulations and instead relies on the General Duty Clause. While one might argue that the generality of the clause suffices in providing heat protection for workers, in practice the vagueness makes enforcement difficult. For example, since the law does not define “excessive heat” or specify the exact number of minutes for rest a business can argue that the law is being applied unfairly if they are cited for violations. As would be suspected, industries with outdoor workers affected by heat generally oppose specific standards.
The main argument given in favor of HB 433 was that it would prevent a patchwork of local regulations that would hurt industry. This argument does have some appeal and a business that operates in multi jurisdictions would face difficulties in being aware of and complying with the various laws. That said, the Republican backers of this law profess to favor local control. As one would suspect, they favor local control when the locals are passing laws they like but oppose local control when they dislike the laws. One can say the same of Democrats. This is like the use of states’ rights arguments—people favor states’ rights when the states are doing what they like and the Federal government is not but oppose them when the opposite is true. The abortion and migration issues provide a good example of this as Republicans favor state rights for limiting abortion but oppose it when states oppose Trump’s migration policies and actions, such as when states complain about ICE agents killing people.
To be fair and balanced, the issue of local control is one that can be debated in good faith. As a general principle, I do favor local control based partially on my agreement with a principle of autonomy that provides a presumption of choice at the individual level and requires justifying each step up in imposition. But these step ups can be justified often because of what seems to be a paradox of liberty and rights: liberty and rights require placing limits on liberties and rights. While this might initially seem Orwellian, it makes sense when you consider examples. For example, your freedom of expression requires limiting the freedom of others to silence you. As another example, your right to life requires limiting the rights of others to keep you safe. To use a silly example, I support a general law against murdering people and not allowing individuals, cities or counties to pass laws allowing murder. For social policies and laws, I also usually operate using the principle of utility—judging these by the harm and benefit.
Getting back to the heat safety issue, one could argue that heat safety should not be left up to cities and counties because allowing such regulation would cause too much harm. This would certainly make sense if Florida had statewide heat laws or if the national law was effective. But this is not the case. As such, the effect of the law is to prevent local governments from protecting workers from the serious dangers of heat. It is thus not surprising that Florida is exceeded only by Texas in the number of workers killed by heat exposure. Does this mean that the state legislature is morally accountable for the injuries and deaths caused by the lack of regulations? The obvious answer would be that they bear some responsibility by failing to provide protection and preventing local governments from doing so. One might wonder why industry leaders oppose such regulations. Well, not much—I am sure everyone immediately thought “money.”
When I was younger and more naïve, I tended to think business leaders did evil things because they value profit more than the well-being of other people. This would at least make some sense; they were hurting people to get something they wanted. But the more I learned about business, the more it seemed that business leaders sometimes acted in ways that hurt people but also resulted in lost profits. This would seem to mean that these business geniuses were either ignorant and evil (doing harm, thinking it would profit them) or extra evil (doing harm despite knowing it would cost them profits). As a philosopher and not a politician, I cannot just make accusations without evidence, so let us work through the arguments.
While the arguments against safety regulations about heat do focus on heat, they also follow a standard template used to argue against regulations on general. One stock argument is to claim that regulation would impose a “one size fits all” standard that fails to consider important differences. While this does have some merit, this problem arises for almost any law, and the challenge is to write laws that address this concern. If this argument had merit, then it would also apply to almost any law—which is something that could be accepted (some anarchists, for example, might buy this).
A second argument is that regulation results in micromanagement that will waste time and money. As someone who just had to use my own money to complete four hours of continuing education training and engage in extensive record keeping complying with the new Florida laws regulating homeowners’ associations, I get this objection. I am an uncompensated volunteer HOA director for my neighborhood because the law also requires three officers and everyone else was sensible enough to avoid the headache, cost and annoyance of complying with hundreds of pages of laws.
As a professor who heads up the GENED committees at my university, I am compelled by the state to spend hours completing tasks to ensure that we are complying with all the new laws micromanaging education. So, I feel this objection and feel that it has merit every time I have do some paperwork that seems like imposed nonsense because of the Republican culture war against “wokeness” and “DEI.”
That said, the problem is not requiring people to comply with a law and provide some documentation. The problems are defective laws and excessive paperwork. In the case of heat regulations, the solutions to heat exposure are simple and well understood (shade breaks and hydration) and documentation could and should be minimal. So, saying that there are laws that impose too much work is a criticism of those laws, not law in general. Unless, once again, one is an anarchist.
A third argument is the “we’ll be good” argument. The strategy is to argue that regulation is not needed because businesses will act well on their own, perhaps because they allege to care about their workers. This can have some appeal in that if people will, in fact, behave well without laws, then laws are not needed. For example, when states pass bathroom bills alleging that transpeople will attack women in bathrooms, they are passing a law that is not needed because transpeople generally do not attack people in bathrooms and laws already exist to protect people from being attacked. But we know from history that enough businesses will do bad things that they need to be regulated, just like we know that sexual assault and theft are enough of a problem that we need laws against them.
A fourth argument is the classic appeal to small business. Big industries with big businesses often argue that a law will hurt a small business and then use this to argue that the law should not be passed. This can be a fair point. For example, I am a director for a tiny HOA with under 20 houses that barely has any money for expenses and yet I must comply with rules designed for larger operations. To be fair and balanced, the HOA law does divide HOAs into two main groups (three in some cases) that allows smaller HOAs to be less burdened by the law. While this example shows that someone can be annoyed by a law applying to a small business, it also shows that laws can be crafted to account for the difference (and usually are). So, if a heat regulation destroyed small businesses, one could argue for exemptions. But there is the obvious question of whether such laws would be harmful. I’ll address this in the next essay.
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