Florida summers are dangerous if your job is outdoors. Ask anyone who roofs a house, picks crops, paves a road, or landscapes a lawn in July. So you'd think the people who want to run Florida would be racing to keep those workers safe.

Byron Donalds is racing the other way.

Donalds — the sitting congressman from Southwest Florida and the frontrunner to be Florida's next governor — is one of 60 Republicans co-sponsoring HR 6213, a bill written to block the first federal rule ever designed to protect American workers from extreme heat on the job.

What the bill kills

The rule Donalds wants to stop is not complicated or extreme. Proposed by OSHA in 2024, it would, when temperatures climb past 80 degrees, require employers to give workers:

• Rest breaks
• Access to shade
• Clean drinking water

That's it. Water, shade, and a break when it's dangerously hot. HR 6213 would forbid OSHA from finalizing or enforcing that standard — or anything "substantially similar."

The stakes are life and death. OSHA estimates heat exposure kills at least 559 workers every year and injures or sickens nearly 25,000 more. OSHA says the standard would prevent nearly all of those heat deaths and about 65% of the injuries. Killing the rule means those deaths keep happening.

And it hits Florida especially hard. According to the Florida Policy Institute, at least 611,100 Floridians work outdoors — in agriculture, construction, landscaping, and recreation. Those are the people Donalds is voting to leave unprotected.

Whose side is he on?

The bill's own supporters admit who they're doing this for. As Rep. Greg Casar of Texas put it during Tuesday's hearing, members of Congress "get to work indoors, get paid a fat salary," and are "prioritizing wiping out those heat protections, basically because industry lobbies are asking for it."

That's the whole story. The heat rule has drawn fire from, in the Orlando Weekly's words, "some of the most powerful lobbying forces in the country." Sixty-five labor, health, and advocacy groups signed a letter opposing HR 6213, warning that "workers have no control over extreme heat, and many are unable to refuse hazardous assignments without jeopardizing their livelihoods."

When it's a choice between the lobbyists and the guy sweating on a Fort Myers rooftop, Donalds picked the lobbyists. That's consistent with his record: his top congressional funders included Koch Inc and Florida's electric utilities, the same big-money interests that fund the fight against safety and environmental rules.

Florida won't fill the gap

Donalds and other supporters argue states should handle worker safety themselves. But Florida has made crystal clear it won't.

In 2024, Florida's GOP-controlled Legislature — with Gov. Ron DeSantis's signature — passed HB 433, which barred local governments from making their own heat-safety rules. That law was aimed squarely at killing a Miami-Dade ordinance meant to protect farm and construction workers. Florida also has no state workplace-safety agency of its own, so enforcement falls entirely on an understaffed federal OSHA — which the Orlando Weekly notes has just one inspector for every 93,877 workers in the country.

So the "let the states do it" argument is a dodge. Florida already refused to do it. Donalds now wants to make sure the federal government can't either. That leaves outdoor workers with nothing.

The same playbook he'd bring to the governor's office

This is the tell. Donalds wants to be governor of a state built on outdoor labor — tourism, farming, construction — and his answer to record-breaking heat waves is to block the rule that would give those workers water and shade.

It fits everything else on his record. He voted for Trump's budget bill, which cuts $3.8 billion from Florida's health care system, then claimed it would "protect Medicaid." Over and over, Donalds sides with the powerful and against the people who actually keep Florida running.

When a construction worker collapses on a job site next August because his boss wasn't required to give him a break, remember that Byron Donalds put his name on the bill that made sure of it.

Source

• Orlando Weekly: Florida Republicans jump aboard U.S. House bill that seeks to block heat protection for workers (reporting by McKenna Schueler; photo of Donalds by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons)