by Walter Orly
Texas Governor Greg Abbott, as part of the general trend of reactionization that seeks to concentrate power in the hands of the executive branch, has signed House Bill (HB) 2127, which will override the already insufficient city ordinances in place in cities like Austin and Dallas that allow workers to take a mere ten minute break for every four hours worked in the heat.
The city ordinances overturned by HB 2171 did little to nothing to address the issue of heat breaks but existed to gain a few votes in the electoral farce. According to a warehouse worker in an un-cooled warehouse in Austin, “if you only get ten minutes break for four hours worked that’s called a lunch break, and then it’s the end of your shift.”
The state of Texas has a long history of deregulating industry at the expense of workers to bait in major corporate profiteers from among the most vile sections of the imperialist ruling class. This has been called the “Texas Miracle” in the monopoly media, while it is nothing but a death sentence for some workers.
While so-called “progressive” cities like Austin, which are in the grips of the Democratic Party of the imperialist ruling class, implement ordinances like ten minute heat breaks every four hours, this is only to shine the shoe they use to stomp on workers. Just last month, Felipe Pascaul, a 46-year-old construction worker in the Houston area, was worked to death in the heat, making him the 14th confirmed heat death just this year in Texas. The disgusting hypocrisy of the ruling class is on display here: the same city that has recently gained attention for being the first to legally challenge HB 2127 continues to play the role of overseer in working people to death in the heat. What is at play here is a power struggle between factions of the ruling class for domination over the working class; regardless of which bourgeois party is in office, workers continue to die at the hands of the capitalists.
Texas remains the top state in the country for worker deaths due to heat, and last year saw a two-decade high in heat-related deaths in the state. The Texas Observer reported that in 2017 a worker in Texas died every 16 hours, making on the job deaths dwarf the murders in all of the major cities in the state including Austin, Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio combined. It’s obvious that the Democrats are fine with this murderous exploitation just like the Republicans, but, for a few votes, they’ll pretend that they’re not.
Even in cities that do have ordinances for heat breaks, they are not adequately enforced. It is well-known that undocumented workers are often under-payed or even not paid at all, let alone provided safe working conditions. Capitalists use immigration laws as a hammer that they wave over the heads of undocumented workers, they combine the force of capitalist wage slavery with state terror to gorge themselves on superprofits through an increased rate of exploitation. The Republican House Bill simply removes the ordinance to appeal to the monopolies who might reconsider the larger Texas cities for fear of fines, fines which are almost never issued in the first place.
If you only get ten minutes break for four hours worked that’s called a lunch break, and then it’s the end of your shift.
A year before the ordinance was passed, a Dallas survey among construction workers in August of 2014 found that 66% of job sites did not provide water to the workers, 33% did not allow heat breaks, and 12% of workers had witnessed co-workers faint from the heat while on the job. It is difficult to imagine that this has changed much since there was almost no enforcement of the ordinance to begin with. Now that the city ordinances have been overruled by the state, things will go on more or less how they have been, the company will decide when and who to give breaks to and workers will keep dying on the job. Not only this, but with the heat only getting worse, we can be sure that these figures will be surpassed in the coming years.
