This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
Yes, indeed, it is getting warmer (and warmer and warmer) on this planet of ours. It's not just that records are being set for an ever hotter world, year after year after year, but that when the warmth hits, as the New York Times recently reported, the heat waves "linger longer," sometimes for extra days or even -- yes! -- weeks at a time! Meanwhile, new records are regularly being set for heat not just on land but in the planet's waters, too, shattering previous temperature records for the oceans. And in case it hadn't occurred to you, that's bad news when it comes to the strength of the next hurricane season, which can be supercharged by soaring ocean heat. And then, of course, there's that other record -- the loss of Antarctic sea ice, which will only feed rising sea levels (and sinking coastal communities).
And here's another "yes" on the subject: if, as TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon points out today, the world, which also means your particular world, is getting ever hotter, that's an issue not just for, say, farmers facing megadroughts or devastating megafires, but also for workers in any job that exposes them to the growing heat of this planet of ours. Oh, and in case you hadn't noticed, the head of the Trumpublican Party is now running on a "day one" platform of establishing a "dictatorship" to -- yes, "drill, drill, drill!" And that means, however hot it already is, that party and its presidential candidate are now all-too-publicly committed to making it hotter yet, maybe even as hot as it can get.
And as Gordon reports today, when it comes to this country's workers that's hardly all the Trumpublicans are now committed to do! Tom
Republicans Have Plans for Working People
And You're Not Going to Like Them
Recently, you may have noticed that the hot weather is getting ever hotter. Every year the United States swelters under warmer temperatures and longer periods of sustained heat. In fact, each of the last nine months -- May 2023 through February 2024 -- set a world record for heat. As I'm writing this, March still has a couple of days to go, but likely as not, it, too, will set a record.
Such heat poses increasing health hazards for many groups: the old, the very young, those of us who don't have access to air conditioning. One group, however, is at particular risk: people whose jobs require lengthy exposure to heat. Numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that about 40 workers died of heat exposure between 2011 and 2021, although, as CNN reports, that's probably a significant undercount. In February 2024, responding to this growing threat, a coalition of 10 state attorneys general petitioned the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to implement "a nationwide extreme heat emergency standard" to protect workers from the kinds of dangers that last year killed, among others, construction workers, farm workers, factory workers, and at least one employee who was laboring in an unairconditioned area of a warehouse in Memphis, Tennessee.
Facing the threat of overweening government interference from OSHA or state regulators, two brave Republican-run state governments have stepped in to protect employers from just such dangerous oversight. Florida and Texas have both passed laws prohibiting localities from mandating protections like rest breaks for, or even having to provide drinking water to, workers in extreme heat situations. Seriously, Florida and Texas have made it illegal for local cities to protect their workers from the direct effects of climate change. Apparently, being "woke" includes an absurd desire not to see workers die of heat exhaustion.
And those state laws are very much in keeping with the plans that the national right-wing has for workers, should the wholly-owned Trump subsidiary that is today's Republican Party take control of the federal government this November.
We've Got a Plan for That!
It's not exactly news that conservatives, who present themselves as the friends of working people, often support policies that threaten not only workers' livelihoods, but their very lives. This fall, as we face the most consequential elections of my lifetime (all 71 years of it), rights that working people once upon a time fought and died for -- the eight-hour day, a legal minimum wage, protections against child labor -- are, in effect, back on the ballot. The people preparing for a second Trump presidency aren't hiding their intentions either. Anyone can discover them, for instance, in the Heritage Foundation's well-publicized Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership, a "presidential transition" plan that any future Trump administration is expected to put into operation.
As I've written before, the New York Times's Carlos Lozada did us a favor by working his way through all 887 pages of that tome of future planning. Lacking his stamina, I opted for a deep dive into a single chapter of it focused on the "Department of Labor and Related Agencies." Its modest 35 pages offer a plan to thoroughly dismantle more than a century of workers' achievements in the struggle for both dignity and simple on-the-job survival.
First Up: Stop Discriminating Against Discriminators
I'm sure you won't be shocked to learn that the opening salvo of that chapter is an attack on federal measures to reduce employment discrimination based on race or sex. Its author, Jonathan Berry of the Federalist Society, served in Donald Trump's Department of Labor (DOL). He begins his list of "needed reforms" with a call to "Reverse the DEI Revolution in Labor Policy." "Under the Obama and Biden Administrations," Berry explains, "labor policy was yet another target of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) revolution" under which "every aspect of labor policy became a vehicle with which to advance race, sex, and other classifications and discriminate against conservative and religious viewpoints on these subjects and others, including pro-life views."
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