Tag: Texas

Work Breaks in Texas – Dying from the Heat

As the heat index hit 115 degrees on Monday, Karla Perez took a five-minute water break at a construction site in Dallas. Such rest breaks are required by the city, as they are in Austin.

But a change in Texas state law, which goes into effect in September, will wipe away those local requirements, leaving workers like Ms. Perez to count on their employers to provide time to rest and rehydrate. Right now, she gets three breaks a day. She dreads what the change might bring.

“Workers are going to die,” she said. “There’s no way around it.”
…
The ordinance in Dallas passed after the death of a 25-year-old worker, Roendy Granillo, who was installing hardwood floors in a house without air conditioning when he began to feel sick and asked for a break. The request was denied. He kept working until he collapsed.

The medical examiner’s office said the cause was heat stroke. “My parents were told his organs were cooked from the inside,” said his sister, Jasmine Granillo.

In Battle Over Direction of Texas, an Unlikely Casualty: Water Breaks
A new law pre-empting local labor rules is part of an effort by Republicans in the Capitol to exert control over the state’s Democratic-led major cities.

Molly Ivins on Picking a Governor

Tough as Bob War and Other Stuff June 7, 1986

We’ve just survived another political season largely unscathed. I voted for Bobby Locke for governor: he’s the one who challenged Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi to hand-to-hand combat. In the Gulf of Sidra. On the Line of Death. At high noon. Next Fourth of July, “Only one of us will come out of the water alive,” said Locke. Locke thinks the trouble with America is that we’ve lost respect for our leaders and this would be a way to restore some. Me too. Besides, you should have seen the other guys.

The Republicans had a congressman running who thinks you get AIDS through your feet. That’s representative Tom Loeffler of Hunt, who is smarter than a box of rocks. His television advertisements proudly claimed, “He’s as tough as bob war” (bob war is what you make fences with), and also that in his youth Loeffler played football with two broken wrists. This cause uncharitable persons to question the man’s good sense, so he explained that he didn’t know his wrists were broken at the time. Loeffler went to San Francisco during the campaign to make a speech. While there, he wore shower caps on his feet while showering lest he get AIDS from the tile in the tub. He later denied that he had spent the entire trip in his hotel room. He said: “I did walk around the hotel. I did see people who do have abnormal tendencies. I’d just as soon not be associated with abnormal people.” If that’s true, what was he doing running for governor of Texas?”

Molly Ivins

The Nation 1865-1990: Selections From the Independent Magazine of Politics and Culture

God Wants Me to Have the Women and the Air Conditioner

The first thing he claimed — even though he already had a wife, a 14-year-old girl, pushing legal limits in Texas, but she had her parents permission so the marriage was legal — he announced that God now wanted him to have wives, multiple wives. He pointed out some scriptural passages that he said backed this up, and he claimed that he needed multiple wives because it was his job to sire 24 children who would become elders and help rule after the kingdom of God’s reestablished, at the end times. Then he further announces that among all the women at Mount Carmel, every woman of childbearing age — and that would be, say, from 12 up — were now his wives and could have sex only with him for procreation purposes. The husbands of these women were forbidden to have sex at all anymore. And Koresh said this was a blessing to them because now they could focus their energies on studying the Bible more and becoming more worthy of the Lord. So it was sex. It was everyone else’s wives. And he even decided God wanted him to have the only unit air conditioning in Mount Carmel.

30 years after the siege, ‘Waco’ examines what led to the catastrophe

Interview was regarding:
Waco: David Koresh, The Branch Davidians and a Legacy of Rage
Jeff Guinn

Texas Outlaws Abortion

Ahead of Texas’ abortion ban going into effect on Sept. 1, NPR’s Michel Martin speaks with Dr. Ghazaleh Moayedi, an OB/GYN, about what it means for abortion providers and patients there.

MARTIN: Could you talk more about – without compromising their privacy, of course – like, what are some of the other things that patients have been saying to you as this deadline approaches? Is there heightened fear?

MOAYEDI: Yes. People are very afraid. People understand, right? They understand that the abortion that they’re having this week, last week, the week before, is something that they wouldn’t be able to have next week. They’ve been asking about it and asking, you know, if I were here in September, would I be able to get this?

And, you know, this is a story I’ve told often, but a few years ago, when our state legislator was debating a different bill – it was a bill that would give the death penalty to people that got an abortion and to providers who provided abortion, right? – something so extreme. And it didn’t make it very far. But I had a patient that week that came in and told me, doc, I know that I’m going to get the death penalty for this, but I need this abortion. That is very real.

https://www.npr.org/2021/08/29/1032259863/texas-ob-gyn-my-existence-is-in-violation-of-the-new-abortion-law