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A right to drink? Inside the debate to protect US workers against the heat
Dallas, Texas – More than a decade later, Eva Marroquin’s voice still shakes when she talks about it.
The 51-year-old mother of five had been working construction in Austin, Texas, for about five years when she heard that a friend had died of heat exposure at a worksite. It was 2012, and he had been helping to build a bridge at the intersection of two local highways.
“He just couldn’t get to the water in time,” Marroquin said.
The news shook Marroquin, who had experienced her own close calls with the sweltering temperatures that broil the southern United States in the summertime.
After days of painting walls or cleaning up sites, Marroquin’s face would burn red in the heat. Sometimes, she felt feverish and dizzy. Her throat would even close. It left her with haunting thoughts of what her friend must have lived through in his final moments.
“I distinctly remember how that felt, and it made me want to speak up even more,” Marroquin told Al Jazeera.
Marroquin is among the advocates pushing for greater protections for workers facing extreme temperatures in the US.
The US Department of Health and Human Services found that heat-related deaths overall have been on the rise, as climate change drives temperatures to new heights. In 2023, an estimated 2,302 people died from heat-related conditions, up from 1,722 in 2022 and 1,602 in 2021.
But in the US, there are no federal protections specifically designed to protect workers from environmental heat.
Marroquin and other workplace advocates are lobbying to change that — but in the meantime, state and local governments in the US have been duking it out over the authority to protect workers from the stifling heat.
A fight between state and local authority
On July 1, a new law comes into effect in Florida that reflects those tensions.
Last summer was the hottest on record in the state, prompting Miami-Dade County to consider an ordinance that would mandate heat safety training, regular breaks and access to water during high-temperature days.
But Florida Governor Ron DeSantis blocked that attempt, signing a law that instead banned local governments from establishing their own workplace safety requirements for heat exposure.
“There was a lot of concern out of one county, Miami-Dade,” DeSantis told local press at the time, warning that the local ordinance would have caused “a lot of problems”.
Florida was the second state in recent months to pass such a law. In 2023, Texas Governor Greg Abbott also signed what critics called the “Death Star” bill — so named for its ability to destroy local regulations that went beyond existing state mandates.
It, too, prevented municipalities from implementing their own heat safety laws, effectively killing ordinances in areas like Austin and Dallas. Houston and other cities have challenged the law in court.
As in Florida, however, proponents of the law have argued that a patchwork of local regulations would be too cumbersome for companies to navigate. Business groups also warned of “local government overreach”.
“The Texas law is mostly focused on preventing the big municipalities from doing basically anything that might make doing business in Texas inconvenient or location-specific,” said Alison Grinter, a civil rights lawyer in the Dallas metropolitan area.
She explained that the oil and gas industries have long held sway in Texas politics and helped craft the state’s business-friendly reputation. That, in turn, has attracted technology and finance companies to the state as well.
Grinter added that part of the motive for blocking the local ordinances was also political. While the Texas state government is dominated by Republicans, several of its biggest cities — including Houston and Austin — are led by Democrats.
“For culture war purposes, the idea that there are four or five different big oases in the middle of the state that are sanctuaries from all of the reactionary social laws really galls lawmakers,” Grinter said.
Still, only five states have taken it upon themselves to pass heat-exposure protections. They include California, Oregon, Washington, Colorado and Minnesota.
“The Texas government doesn’t want local laws, but they also don’t want a statewide law,” said Ana Gonzalez of the Texas AFL-CIO, a labour union. “So workers are stuck.”
Petitioning the federal government
That gridlock on the state and local level has shifted the battle over workplace protections to the federal government.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) mandates that employers implement a workplace safety policy, but it does not indicate how that policy must address heat protection.
That may be changing, though. In 2021, OSHA announced it would start to develop a rule to mitigate the risks of heat-related injuries and deaths for workers, and a spokesperson, Kimberly Darby, told Al Jazeera that this month marked an important step forward.
“Last week, OSHA’s proposed rule was sent to the Office of Management and Budget for review,” Darby said. “We are another step closer to giving workers the protections they need and deserve.”
The proposed rule, however, has yet to be published — and its exact contents are therefore unknown. In addition, new OSHA rules can take years to achieve final approval.
So some advocates are looking to another federal body: the Federal Emergency Management Agency or FEMA.
On June 17, 31 organisations — including immigrants’ rights groups, environmental nonprofits and farmworkers unions — petitioned FEMA (PDF) to provide disaster relief funds for extreme heat, as well as areas affected by wildfire smoke.
It is part of a broader effort to convince the federal government to step in for their local counterparts, according to Will Humble, who signed the petition on behalf of the Arizona Public Health Association, a nonprofit.
“Planning for and saving lives is a state and local responsibility,” Humble told Al Jazeera. “But FEMA really should include heat emergencies in their funding. Many county health departments are understaffed.”
‘Not seen as human’
In the absence of strong federal action, activists like Christine Bolaños say that employers are left with all the power to decide how to address extreme heat in the workplace, leaving workers at risk.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), at least 600 workers died from heat exposure while working from 2005 to 2021. An additional 43 deaths were documented in 2022 alone.
Experts indicate the actual number is likely higher, as heat-related deaths are difficult to track.
A broad swath of the workforce is at risk, too. The bureau estimates that 33 percent of American employees spend time outdoors as part of their everyday work.
Especially vulnerable are foreign-born Latino labourers, including both legal and undocumented immigrants, who represent a disproportionate number of work-related deaths.
Though these workers make up only 8.2 percent of the workforce, they represent 14 percent of on-the-job fatalities. The bureau also noted that Latino workers make up the majority of the construction and agricultural labour, two industries where heat exposure is an acute risk.
Bolaños — a staff member at the Workers Defense Project, a community organisation that fights for the rights of low-wage immigrant construction workers in Texas — said the heightened risks are part of a pattern of exploitation.
“Immigrant workers are especially prone to wage theft and other violations of their rights, and they’re often not aware of their rights,” said Bolaños.
The lack of heat-related protections, she added, was a reflection of how workplaces perceive these employees.
“Sometimes, they’re not seen as human,” Bolaños said. “They are not valued for their humanity, just what they can produce. Employers forget workers need to drink water. They need shade; they need breaks.”
‘The monster is here’
Congressman Greg Casar, a Texas Democrat, believes part of the problem is also scepticism towards climate change itself — and a resistance to addressing its dangers.
“Many of us progressives used to campaign on ‘the climate crisis is coming,’ and we were accused of making up a monster that didn’t exist,” Casar told Al Jazeera.
“Now the monster is here, and the things we’re fighting for have become so basic. We’re arguing over food and housing. We’re arguing over people having the right to a water break.”
Casar has spent years organising demonstrations to showcase the plight of workers — including through “thirst strikes”, where he and others refused to drink for hours, to demonstrate the risks of extreme heat.
At a “thirst strike” last year, Marroquin’s coarse, strong hands clutched a sign that read, “PEOPLE OVER PROFITS”.
Tears flowed from her eyes, which she says have been damaged by the sun and heat. She explained she developed pterygium, a kind of fleshy growth near one of her eyes, from her exposure to hot, dry conditions.
Now, a year later, Marroquin told Al Jazeera she hopes change will come soon. Just this month, she spoke to OSHA about her experience and gave feedback on the forthcoming federal rule.
“It’s really difficult to implement laws about work,” she conceded. “But we have to demand that OSHA implements rules as a whole across construction sites, in the same way they demand scaffolding is built in a certain way.”
But even with a federal standard on the way, advocates and legal experts are wary. Several told Al Jazeera that new OSHA rules are notoriously difficult to pass because of understaffing and a high standard of review, as well as potential legal challenges.
Gonzalez, the advocate from the Texas AFL-CIO, said she was bracing for the mandatory public commenting period for the eventual rule — at which time, she expects corporations to weigh in.
“I’m sure there will be pushback from the state or associations, because the rule will impact all industries,” she said. “But hopefully, this is going to prevent people from dying.”
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A 1,000-strong “dark fleet” of rogue oil tankers skirting sanctions has emerged as a new target for the U.S. and Ukraine, a senior maritime intelligence analyst claims.
Michelle Wiese Bockmann warned the aging fleet poses geopolitical risks and threats of $1 billion oil spills, with the recent U.S. seizures in Venezuela and Ukrainian drone strikes in the Black Sea marking a turning point for both nations in their efforts.
“There are about 1,000 vessels worldwide that are trading sanctioned crude tankers containing sanctioned Iranian, Venezuelan and Russian oil,” Bockmann told Fox News Digital.
“These vessels are a lifeline for these regimes, because they’re used for shipping oil to fund the war in Ukraine, and also give money to the illicit Maduro regime,” she added.
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U.S. seized the Skipper, a Venezuelan oil tanker. ( Planet Labs PBC/Reuters)
“This is a brand-new problem for the U.S., and now Ukraine has signaled they are going to target these vessels the same way,” she said. “There is a new strategy to deal with this dark fleet, which is the lifeline of sanctioned oil revenues, and now under attack by the U.S. and Ukraine. The strategy is all to counter what we call gray-zone aggression.”
US ESCALATION WITH MADURO HALTS DEPORTATION FLIGHTS TO VENEZUELA
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt was questioned about the U.S. seizing an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela. (Planet Labs PBC/Handout via Reuters )
Recent Ukrainian naval drone strikes have disabled several tankers in the Black Sea, including the Dashan, part of Russia’s so-called shadow fleet that Ukraine says helps Moscow export oil in defiance of sanctions, according to Reuters.
“It is dangerous and could be interpreted as a form of gray-zone aggression in order to continue to keep oil revenue flowing,” Bockmann said.
“This is all a billion-dollar oil spill catastrophe waiting to happen,” she added, pointing to the environmental and navigational risks posed by poorly maintained, uninsured ships.
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Footage of the Dashan tanker, purportedly part of the Russian shadow fleet hit by Ukraine. (Security Service Official/Handout via Reuters)
She said a subset of “about 350 to 400 vessels at any one time are not only sanctioned but falsely flying flags, which is dangerous,” because false registration leaves vessels stateless and uninsured, putting crews at risk.
“This is a huge issue for maritime safety, it’s a menace to the environment, and it entails crew welfare,” Bockmann said.
These vessels, she said, are typically “elderly” and used solely for sanctioned oil trades. Many also “manipulate AIS” to show they are in one place when they are actually elsewhere.
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Dashan, a tanker from Russia’s shadow fleet, transits the Bosphorus en route to the Black Sea in Istanbul. (Yoruk Isik/Reuters)
“They use false flagging, but also, spoofing and manipulating its AIS to show it’s in one place when it’s not. These vessels have also gone to fraudulent registries that don’t exist, which means they have no insurance,” she said. “Their certificates of seaworthiness are invalid, and they have relied on international maritime conventions to have what’s called the right of innocent passage so they can’t get intercepted.”
Bockmann said U.S. forces have used legal tools including Article 110 of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which allows boarding of stateless vessels, to stop these ships.
“It’s my belief that they used Article 110, and they got on board that vessel, and they were absolutely entitled to remove that vessel from global trade,” she said.
VENEZUELA ACCUSES US OF ‘PIRACY’ AFTER SEIZING MASSIVE OIL TANKER
Attorney General Pam Bondi speaks during a roundtable meeting on Antifa with President Donald Trump in the State Dining Room at the White House, on Wednesday, Oct. 8, 2025, in Washington, D.C. (Evan Vucci/AP)
In the Caribbean, U.S. forces recently seized the tanker Skipper, sanctioned in 2022 and found to be masking its location, under a federal warrant as part of a broader campaign to disrupt illicit oil shipping.
“The recent Venezuelan tanker was carrying 1.8 million barrels of oil uninsured, so that’s a billion-dollar maritime disaster waiting to happen,” Bockmann said.
As reported by Fox News Digital, Dec. 12 saw Attorney General Pam Bondi frame the U.S. seizure of a Venezuelan crude tanker as a sanctions-enforcement action rooted in a federal court warrant.
Meanwhile, in the Black Sea, Ukraine targeted multiple alleged “shadow fleet” tankers with sea drones, according to Reuters.
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“The three tankers that have been targeted by Ukraine are all in ballast, which means that they weren’t carrying oil,” Bockmann said.
“That was carefully chosen, and they were also falsely flagged, just like in the recent case of the three tankers attacked in Ukraine. That flag was Gambia. In the U.S. case of Skipper, the flag was Guyana,” Bockmann said.
Fox News Digital’s Morgan Phillips contributed to this report.
As the curtain falls on 2025, policymakers in Brussels have yet to decisively counter the negative economic impacts of two major developments: the trade deal struck between the European Union and the United States this summer, and President Trump’s so-called “Big Beautiful Bill”, a mammoth piece of domestic legislation with global economic implications.
The EU’s slow progress toward improving relative business conditions at such a volatile moment has left investors frustrated and looking elsewhere.
According to a report published this week by the European Round Table for Industry, the leaders of the bloc’s industrial giants are “alarmed at the lack of urgency in delivering on Draghi and Letta’s bold reforms to restore the business case for investing in Europe.”
The report also points to a survey of CEOs conducted in October, which shows that only 55% expect to stick to their investment plans. Even worse, a mere 8% intend to invest more in Europe than they planned to six months prior, in contrast with the 38% who will either invest less than previously intended or have put decisions on hold.
And most tellingly, the US now attracts more investment than originally planned by 45% of respondents.
The ‘carrot-and-stick’ approach
The Trump administration’s combination of supply-side economics and protectionism has converted the necessity of avoiding US tariffs into a massive financial incentive for foreign companies and multinationals to invest in the United States directly.
The Big Beautiful Bill, which Trump signed into law in July, formalised huge tax breaks and effectively guaranteed incentives to shift investments across the Atlantic. Namely, the 100% bonus depreciation for new machinery and factories, as well as the 100% immediate expensing of domestic research and development (R&D) costs, mitigating the expenses of moving production and innovation to the US.
Companies have until 1 January 2026 to finalize their decisions and collect retroactive benefits for capital deployed in 2025, but the conditions will remain the same next year.
To compound the EU’s growing inability to compete, the heavily criticised EU-US trade deal was agreed in the same month. The agreement de-escalated the transatlantic trade war of 2025 but it levied a 15% tariff on the vast majority of the EU’s industrial exports to the US, with an exemption from duties for most US-made goods bound for the EU market.
In addition, the EU committed to spending over €640 billion in US energy, investing more than €500 billion in the US economy and buying around €35 billion worth of US-made AI chips, until the end of President Trump’s mandate. Meanwhile, the United States made no similar pledges.
As for corporations, the choice became simple: relocate investment to the US, avoid the tariff and claim massive tax deductions.
The innovation gap in numbers
The R&D siphon is the most critical threat to Europe’s future competitiveness, as the Trump administration’s new incentives pull core innovation to the US.
In the most innovative industries, such as the AI and healthcare sectors, the numbers for 2025 already demonstrate the chasm between the EU and the US.
In the first three quarters of this year, private investment flowing into US AI companies exceeded €100 billion, with the US capturing over 80% of global AI funding. In contrast, the entire EU attracted just shy of €7 billion, according to the widely read State of AI Report 2025.
This severe 15-to-1 funding deficit means the technological future is being built and scaled primarily outside the EU, something that has been recognised by the European Parliament.
Likewise, the EU is aiming to achieve 20% market share in semiconductor manufacturing by 2030, as outlined in the Chips Act, but experts say such a goal is unlikely given that Europe is among the slowest growers in the sector year-on-year.
Furthermore, the EU is even falling behind on AI adoption among young users, according to a new survey by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.
As for the pharmaceutical industry, CEOs sent a stark warning to President von der Leyen back in April that “unless Europe delivers rapid, radical policy change then pharmaceutical research, development and manufacturing is increasingly likely to be directed towards the US.”
In the following weeks, fuelled by the fear of the ongoing transatlantic trade war at the time and frustration with the European regulatory scene, the third largest company in Europe by market capitalization, the Swiss-based Roche, committed over €40 billion in US investment over the next five years. Likewise, the French multinational Sanofi announced an investment of €17 billion to expand manufacturing in the US through 2030.
In July, as the Big Beautiful Bill and the EU-US trade deal were being agreed, the British-Swedish company AstraZeneca also declared investing over €40 billion in the US over the next five years, including the construction of a chronic disease research centre in the state of Virginia, the company’s largest single investment in a facility to date.
In November, the White House announced a large-scale agreement between two pharmaceutical rivals, the American manufacturer Eli Lilly, and the Danish corporation Novo Nordisk, known for pioneering the prescription drug for type 2 diabetes, Ozempic, which has also been widely used off-label for weight loss.
The two companies agreed a strategy to reduce the prices of several medications for Americans and announced new investments in the US, with Novo Nordisk committing roughly €8.5 billion to expand US manufacturing capacity. In exchange, the Danish company is expected to receive a three-year exemption from US tariffs, among other benefits.
In total, the European pharmaceutical industry has pledged more than €100 billion for US expansion in 2025 alone with multi-year commitments.
The scramble to deregulate
The pressure applied by the US is evident as this year has seen the European Commission pivot to an aggressive deregulation agenda.
In response to a request from the European Council, six simplification proposals, referred to as “omnibuses”, have been presented since February covering energy, finance, agriculture, technology, defence and chemicals.
Notably, the so-called Digital Omnibus was introduced in November, and it includes delays to provisions of the AI Act and modifications to the GDPR.
These initiatives aim to rapidly cut red tape and reduce bureaucratic costs for European businesses in an attempt to stem the outflow of talent and capital. However, the proposed measures are still facing legislative scrutiny, as well as administrative oversight and political backlash from privacy and climate advocates, among others.
It was only this week that an agreement was finally reached on the first omnibus, another sign that the EU is still far from offering the immediate financial certainty of minimising or avoiding US tariffs while benefiting from President Trump’s policies where possible.
The numbers reveal the plain economic truth: while the EU debates the fine print of deregulation, the investment in innovation is already being decisively relocated.
Star Dakota Johnson made a surprise appearance on “Saturday Night Live” this week, playing the mysterious “Madeline” during Lily Allen‘s performance of that track. The song was Allen’s second of the night.
During the performance, Johnson was mostly hidden behind a screen through the song, as Allen sang about the mistress. But Johnson performed the spoken word portion of the song, which appears on Allen’s album “West End Girl.” In the track, Allen notes that she and her signficant other “had an arrangement: Be discreet and don’t be blatant. And there had to be payment. It had to be with strangers. But you’re not a stranger, Madeline.”
Later in the song, “Madeline” explains her side of the story via texts to Allen: “I hate that you’re in so much pain right now. I really don’t wanna be the cause of any upset. He told me that you were aware this was going on and that he had your full consent. If he’s lying about that, then please let me know. Because I have my own feelings about dishonesty. Lies are not something that I wanna get caught up in. You can reach out to me any time, by the way. If you need any more details or you just need to vent or anything. Love and light, Madeline.”
After reading those lines, Johnson came out from behind the curtain and walked up to Allen — and gave her a quick kiss.
“Madeline” is one of the standout tracks from Allen’s new album “West End Girl,” and has led to much speculation over who the mysterious pseudonym is (or might be a composite of). At least one person has told the press that she is “Madeline,” although Allen has said that it’s actually a composite of several women.
For her first “SNL” number, Allen performed “Sleepwalking” from “West End Girl,” in a bedroom set under a neon sign. Given the saucy lyrics, Allen did have to censor herself, omitting the lyric, “Why aren’t we fucking, baby?” (She did the same thing with “Madeline,” avoiding part of the line “I’m not convinced that he didn’t fuck you in our house.”)
Allen appeared on “Saturday Night Live” to promote “West End Girl,” which has been met with wide acclaim for its brutal honesty and craftsmanship. The album addresses her split from “Stranger Things” star David Harbour, without ever mentioning him by name. (As characterized through scathing lyrics on songs such as “Pussy Palace,” “Sleepwalking” and “Madeline.”)
In his Variety review, Chris Willman called “West End Girl” a contender for album of the year. He wrote of “savoring every confessional line and wondering what the hell she was going to tell us in the next one to top it. It’s the pleasure of listening to a master storyteller who makes your jaw drop by seeming to have spilled all the tea almost at the outset, and then the tea just keeps on coming. Not since Boston in 1773, maybe, has anyone dumped it this massively, or this fulfillingly.”
“West End Girl” repped Allen’s first album release since 2018. Allen has announced a tour next March to support the album, which marks Allen’s first time touring since 2019.
This is Allen’s second time on “Saturday Night Live,” following an appearance on the Feb. 3, 2007 episode hosted by Drew Barrymore. During that episode, Allen performed the tracks “Smile” and “LDN” from her debut album “Alright, Still.”
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