The years-long drive to give Florida’s nursery and farm workers landmark health protections from increasingly scorching summer heat appears to have reached a dead end.

After efforts to pass laws were stalled in Miami-Dade County and then rebuffed last year by the Florida Legislature, which also banned counties from setting their own rules, the last agency actively working on proposals was the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

While the Trump administration hasn’t commented publicly, it’s already taken steps to delay a pending set of heat rules and gutted OSHA staff working on the issue. Though a meeting posted by the Biden administration is still set for June, worker advocacy groups, former OSHA staffers and others involved in the effort no longer expect significant changes in how the agricultural and other industries handle the growing risks from extreme heat.

It’s a disappointing result for a “Que Calor” campaign that started in the fields of South Miami-Dade four years ago. By 2023, the worker-driven effort seemed on the verge of winning historic protections like mandatory water and shade breaks for more than 100,000 farm nursery workers and construction workers in Miami-Dade before lobbying from the agricultural and construction industries derailed it at County Hall then in Tallahassee.

“We’re hearing still that workers in many plant nurseries here in South Florida are denied basic protections like water, rest and shade,” said Oscar Londoño, the executive director of WeCount!, a nonprofit fighting for better working conditions. “In the absence of federal action, and given the recent preemption at the statewide level of local key protections, we know that thousands of workers here are at risk of suffering, heat-related illnesses and even death.”

OSHA’s draft heat rule, published last July, would require supplying outdoor workers water when temperatures exceed higher than 80 degrees. When temperatures rise above 90 degrees, it also would include mandatory 15-minute breaks every two hours, among other steps intended to protect the health of workers most exposed to rising temperatures driven by climate change.

The rule, the last surviving government effort after Florida lawmakers killed a proposal in Florida, made it through a public commenting period last year but was ordered to be paused on President Donald Trump’s first day back in office. On April 9, Trump put out a memo that directed federal agencies to send lists of rules that they think should be eliminated, echoing complaints from industries about efforts to pass such rules in Florida. Jose Smith, the CEO of Costa Farms, wrote in a Herald Op-Ed in Oct. 2023 that oversight from the county would be an “existential crisis” for the agriculture and construction industry and “a bottomless pit of red tape, lost time and money.”

“Promoting economic growth and American innovation are top priorities of this Administration. Unlawful, unnecessary, and onerous regulations impede these objectives and impose massive costs on American consumers and American businesses,” Trump’s memo said.

Miguel Rios, who was a regional agricultural enforcement coordinator at the U.S. Department of Labor for 27 years until 2022, said the heat ruling doesn’t align with the marching orders that have been given to agencies from the Trump administration.

“What OSHA says needs to be done effectively costs people money, because compliance is not free,” Rios said. “I really do think the future is pretty bleak when it comes to new regulations, and I think this is right along with any other regulation that may cost employers any amount of money to comply with.”

Staff gutted, offices closed

There are nearly two million outdoor workers in Florida, and climate change is making extreme heat more common, putting outdoor workers in danger more often than ever before. A Homestead plant nursery worker told the Miami Herald this week, “We all worry that we might not survive.”

But the Trump administration has been erasing words like “climate change” and “clean energy” from government websites and in an executive order, Trump instructed the Department of Justice to “stop the enforcement” of state climate laws, which he suggests are unconstitutional.

Julie Su, the former Secretary of Labor in the Biden administration, said she met WeCount! workers in Homestead, Fla., and that their telling her they felt like “beasts of burden” and “treated like animals” stuck with her. She said she and Biden felt a federal heat standard was necessary when Florida shut down the county’s rights to set their own rules.

“So far, what we’ve seen has been so rapidly anti-worker on every front, starting with eliminating so many positions inside the Department of Labor, that it’s going to be difficult, if not impossible, for them to actually finish these rules,” Su said. “But I’m hoping against hope that they recognize why this is so important and why people die when they fall down on their responsibilities.”

This month, the administration also gutted the majority of staff at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. NIOSH was responsible for the research and recommendations that formed OSHA’s heat guidelines.

With the controversial Department of Government Efficiency, under the direction of billionaire Elon Musk, shuttering 11 OSHA offices across the country including in Baton Rouge and Houston, worker advocates say the future looks bleak for oversight of industry — and not just with heat rules.

“It would be wonderful if they did their job and completed the rule — it isn’t supposed to be politically driven. But I’m very skeptical because of the administration’s hostility to regulate,” said Doug Parker, the assistant secretary of OSHA under the Biden administration.

Possibly a less rigid rule

Conn Maciel Carey, a law firm representing employers in OSHA inspections, investigations and enforcement actions posted on their blog that a federal heat rule is unlikely to cross the finish line over the next four years — at least as now drafted.

“It’s hard to crystal ball this one,” said Beeta Lashkari, a D.C. lawyer who has represented a coalition of hundreds of thousands of workplaces in every state in the nation on the heat ruling. Employers, she said, want to see something something more “performance-based and flexible.”

For example, she said, a federal proposal to give workers time to acclimate to working in the full sun would require employers to do “rigid tracking” of all their employee’s vacation dates for returning employees. Same with the breaks required at certain times at certain temperatures. Instead, they’d prefer something like options like buddy systems and increased heat education training.

“It’s just about that level of tracking employees and the burdens associated with that, with essentially no safety benefit,” Lashkari said.

Some major growers in South Miami-Dade like Costa Farms, which helped led the lobbying campaign to derail efforts in Miami-Dade and Tallahassee, say they already have many measures in place to protect their workers. In July, company managers showed the Herald ice machines and break rooms and said they already started a buddy system for workers to look out for one another.

But multiple workers across other Homestead plant nursery companies echoed that they feel like they can’t speak up to take a break without the risk of getting fired or reminded they are replaceable. The Herald agreed to protect the identity of the outdoor workers who are members of WeCount! out of fear of retaliation from their employer and their immigration status.

“They don’t give us a chance to drink water so I fainted, I couldn’t breathe,” a plant nursery worker who works in a shipping room in a Homestead nursery told the Herald on Sunday. “When the inspector isn’t there, she doesn’t worry whether or not workers will die because of the work.”

The cuts at OSHA are only going to undermine an agency that worker advocacy groups say wasn’t exactly an aggressive enforcer before and was already understaffed. There is only one OSHA inspector for every 80,000 workers, Su said.

“We filled positions that the first Trump administration had cut the first time around. But even with the resources that we built up, the chances of inspection are low,” Su said.

While OSHA has issued fines in Florida, they usually are only given in the case of a serious injury or death, and companies typically face fines that range into no more than the tens of thousands. Under the agency’s existing rules, employers can be fined for heat hazards only if they are “likely to cause death or serious harm.”

One recent example: Doug Ingram & Son Nursery, who did not respond to requests to comment, received a $11,585 fine in January for a “serious” offense after WeCount! submitted a complaint to OSHA. OSHA reported workers were exposed to direct sunlight while weeding and loading and unloading plants for eight to nine hours. OSHA also recommended the nursery establish a heat stress management program, which includes suggestions like encouraging employees to drink a cup of cool water every 15 to 20 minutes rather than relying on thirst and regular break schedules.

But without a formal heat rule, there’s little OSHA can do to enforce the recommendations.

“Workers don’t have the luxury of recommendations,” Londoño said. “Workers need real, meaningful, enforceable standards that they can exercise at the workplace to guarantee these protections.”

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Ashley Miznazi is a climate change reporter for the Miami Herald funded by the Lynn and Louis Wolfson II Family Foundation in partnership with Journalism Funding Partners.

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