On a hot afternoon last July, a tropical plant nursery worker named Sandra fainted while driving an open-air tractor down a public road between fields in Homestead, Florida.

Her vision darkened and her body slumped, but the tractor kept moving. After a harrowing moment, she regained control and pulled off to the side of the road.

Then came the most dangerous part — at least, for her job prospects. She decided to take a break without her employer’s permission.

“I said to myself, ‘Well, let the boss be mad.’ I’m going to rest for a moment,” said Sandra, who asked to be identified only by her first name to avoid repercussions at work. “It was just too hot to go on.”

Like Sandra, 2 million Floridians work outside through the hottest days of summer. None of them are protected by local, state or federal workplace safety laws that guarantee their access to water, shade and rest on dangerously hot days.

Florida’s state legislature banned cities and counties from creating such workplace protections in 2024. Now, the Trump administration is walking back efforts begun under former President Joe Biden to create federal heat standards and slowing federal workplace inspections, according to reporting from the New York Times.

That leaves Floridians without government oversight at any level as they work through increasingly hot summer days. The state has become a poster child for the threats outdoor workers face from rising temperatures — and a laboratory for new tactics to convince companies to offer voluntary heat protection policies for employees.

“There’s no way to talk about the ongoing fight for heat protections nationally without talking about what’s happening in Florida, both on side of the problem and more importantly on the side of the solution,” said Oscar Londoño, co-executive director of WeCount!, a human rights group pushing for heat safety protections in the plant nursery industry.

Dozens of American workers die from heat-related illnesses each year and thousands more are injured, according to federal statistics. Those numbers probably undercount heat’s true toll, since toiling under the sun gradually contributes to chronic illnesses such as kidney failure and raises the risk exhausted workers will have accidents like falls or crashes. In Florida, heat kills a worker almost every summer.

With few other options, workers are organizing protests and boycotts to pressure companies into giving them water and breaks, following the example of farmworkers in Immokalee, Florida, who won some of America’s strongest heat protections.

In Homestead, WeCount! is organizing plant nursery workers like Sandra along with plant buyers and community members to demand stronger labor protections as part of a campaign called Planting Justice.

“We think the model pioneered by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers is capable of doing what government can’t do right now, which is guaranteeing life-saving protections for workers,” said Londoño.

‘This could kill industry’

State and local lawmakers have rejected workplace heat regulations, siding with companies who say they already protect their employees from the heat. Any additional rules could drive employers out of business, they argue.

Lobbyists for farms and construction companies made that argument in public and behind the scenes in 2023 as Miami-Dade County commissioners considered a bill that would have required employers to give workers like Sandra 10-minute breaks every two hours on hot days.  The CEOs of Costa Farms, a plant nursery, and the Related Group, a real estate developer, called the bill “an existential crisis” for construction and agriculture in a Miami Herald op-ed.

Although commissioners unanimously supported the bill on its first reading, they swung against it just before the final vote.

“This ordinance could potentially kill industry,” commissioner Danielle Cohen Higgins said in the lead-up to the vote.

After a majority of the commissioners announced they had decided to vote against the bill, its sponsors hastily postponed the final vote. It never happened. A few months later, the state legislature passed a preemption bill that forbade any city or county in Florida from creating workplace heat protections. 

Gov. Ron DeSantis said at a press conference that he signed the preemption bill to block the Miami-Dade County effort, which he said “was going to cause a lot of problems down there.”

While Floridians have no specific workplace heat safety rules, companies still have to follow the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s “general duty” clause, which says every employer has to provide a workplace “free from recognized hazards that are causing or are likely to cause death or serious physical harm to his employees.”

OSHA occasionally fines a company when one of its employees drops dead in the heat. Recent Florida fines have ranged from $15,625 for a 28-year-old’s death on his first day of work in 2023 to $30,651 for repeated “serious violations” that led to a 41-year-old’s death in 2024. Under the Biden administration, OSHA launched a “national emphasis program” to ramp up workplace inspections to promote heat safety practices, like giving workers breaks on hot days.

The number of workplace heat inspections rose sharply from 2022 to 2024, but this year, the Labor Department eliminated the higher inspection goals.

In practice, workers say heat safety can vary a lot between companies, or even from one supervisor to another. While some bosses make sure their teams have easy access to water and take breaks on dangerously hot days, others don’t.

“The bosses say they’ve already solved everything, but we don’t feel that way,” said Sandra, who has spent 18 of her 52 years working on Florida farms. “We’re the ones who are suffering.”

A laboratory for change

In the absence of government regulations, Florida has become the national epicenter of workers organizing for heat protections.

Immokalee farmworkers created the most successful model. Starting in the ‘90s, tomato pickers organized protests against abusive employers. In 2001, they launched the Campaign for Fair Food and fanned across the country, visiting churches and college campuses to tell Americans about the dangerous labor conditions under which their food is grown.

The workers drafted a code of conduct that included protections from violence, wage theft and sexual harassment. They demanded Florida tomato growers agree to follow the rules, and they also called on fast food companies and grocery stores to buy tomatoes whenever possible from participating farms. Then they asked Americans to protest and boycott companies, starting with Taco Bell, until they agreed to join the program.

The pressure campaign worked. Nearly all Florida tomato growers agreed to follow the workers’ rules and submit to regular audits and inspections to guarantee compliance. The Fair Food Program (FFP) now covers more than 25,000 farmworkers in 23 states and three countries who grow more than a dozen crops. Fourteen retailers including Walmart, Trader Joe’s and Burger King have agreed to not buy produce from farms that break the rules.

Five years ago, the FFP added mandatory heat protections to its code of conduct. Participating farms have to give workers access to cold water, shaded rest areas and 10-minute breaks every two hours on hot days. Starting this month, they must also offer workers electrolyte drinks or supplements such as Gatorade year round.

“While the hope for federal heat rules now wanes, the FFP is strengthening its protections with mandatory, year-round electrolytes even as it expands to more farms across the country,” Coalition for Immokalee Workers co-founder Lucas Benitez said in an emailed statement.

Workers on South Florida tropical plant nurseries hope to follow suit. This year, they launched the Planting Justice campaign, which would build a similar program around houseplants. Organizers are calling on Costa Farms — the country’s biggest plant nursery, headquartered in Homestead, Florida — to become the first grower to join the program. As part of a national letter writing campaign, more than 2,000 people have written to Costa Farms to urge them to join.

Meanwhile, Planting Justice is courting house plant retailers including Home Depot, Lowe’s, Costco and IKEA to join the program and ramp up pressure on their suppliers to follow the code of conduct.

Costa Farms has previously touted its voluntary efforts to protect its workers from the heat, including air conditioned break rooms and coolers full of ice water. 

“We acknowledge they’ve taken steps to try to lead on the issue of extreme heat,” said Londoño. “By joining the program, they could set a new gold standard and transform the rest of the industry.”