House Bill 2127, which takes effect on Sept. 1, will do away with local rules that require water breaks for construction workers. The cities of Austin and Dallas, for example, require 10-minute breaks every four hours. San Antonio officials had been considering a similar ordinance.
“We are human beings who need respect,” Martínez said. “We really need to be allowed to work without problems, without any barriers … Believe me, we are dying inside those buildings when they take away our water and our [break] time.”
Ribbit
The law is a ten minute break every four hours?? That’s fucking bullshit already!
Where I live it 15 minutes after 2.5 hours if you’re only working 5 hours or less. 2 hours if you’re you’re there all day, but you get your 30-minute lunch after 4 hours, then a fifteen minute break every two hours worked after that.
I worked at a concrete yard in Ontario, Canada for a few years. Breaks due to heat were given based on temps. At one point it was 15 minute breaks with Gatorade provided - every hour.
Americans desperately need to reestablish the proper hierarchy of power.
You have removed child labor laws across a number of states, human rights are basically done, labor has returned to 19th century standards.
So much blood was lost for nothing.
If the politicians can do those jobs under those conditions for a week, have at it
The actual benefit would be some state reps would die during the exercise, and well, that’s enough
Please make Abbot participate.
This will sound like I am not supporting workers, but hear me out. The intention of this law has nothing to do with taking away breaks. There’s this picture being painted of “state and evil construction companies” vs “workers and municipalities.” There’s actually two different fights here: workers vs evil construction companies and, the state vs municipalities. Focusing on the first one is important outside of how the state and city are bickering.
If you know your construction company will take away your 10 min / 4 hr water break because the city can no longer enforce that, that’s NOT the state’s fault because they’re taking a common sense approach to consolidating laws and eliminating bureaucracy. That is an evil fucking construction company.
You want to blame a lawmaker because they assumed no company would be evil enough to do that, fine, but think about that, and the entire scope of this bill, when deciding who to protest against.
EDIT: Sorry to come off looking like a republican shill. That was honestly not my intention. I’ll try harder next time. ESH except the workers trying to stay hydrated!
Every large company will squeeze every second of productivity out of a worker unless it’s forced not to.
The 8 hour work day was fought for by workers, the 5 day work week was fought for by workers, child labor laws were fought for by workers. These things required protests and often time violence to get, because companies were literally killing people through work until these things became labor law.
Removing labor protection does nothing but remove safety for workers and increase profits for corporations.
The free market doesn’t work and has never worked. Anyone who says otherwise is willfully ignorant of history and basic logical reasoning.