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Comment by conductr | Hacker News Reader

I’m in Texas and am around construction. The Mexican dudes can go all day with very little water. They tease my for my hydration and I’m not working half as hard as them. Then I see the urine they leave behind (usually left in drink bottles) and it makes my kidneys hurt.

Also if I don’t hydrate enough in this heat abd am really working then my kidneys literally hurt. It’s my reminder to stop and take a drink. I’ve been working outside a lot this summer and notice it’s much easier to get to that point when it’s over 105F. This summer has been a hot one even for Texas.

Anyways, there’s a cultural machismo amongst the Hispanic laborers that hydration is for putos. They do this with gloves too. I’ll offer gloves when handling materials and they always laugh and say no. Like their calluses hands are their resume. I have soft doctor like hands with no calluses so I do nothing without gloves.

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Feels like they're just trying to Any% a bad rhabdo run.

I'm reminded of something someone'd said regarding PPE:

Who cares what a bunch of other construction dudes think about your hard hat anyway? Some people are just going to be stubborn about any change, no matter what it is. Your family doesn't give a shit what you look like at work. They give a shit that you come home in one piece. Your family would rather they didn't need to change your diapers and feed you with a spoon because some of your coworkers thought the new safety gear looked weird.

Take care of yourself. Wear PPE, do your job right, work smarter, not harder. Your body will thank you in the long run. And for the love of all that is holy, invest in some thermal PPE. You will be amazed how deleterious extreme heat (104+) is to your mental acuity. This is not anecdata, it is fact. Phase Change Materials are the latest I've heard of in the field, and most operations don't seem to spring for them for employees. Do yourself the courtesy of getting some and set up your own safety program. If your boss and coworkers laugh at you, screw em'. You'll pay off in the long run by catching things everyone else is too heat drunk to have noticed.

https://www.mscdirect.com/knowledge-center/articles/cooling-...

Your bosses will never have as much of a stake in you as you do. Be your own advocate.

I tend to agree. It’s a personal safety thing that each person should do what’s best for them. Most guys are functionally their own boss anyway as most are sub contractors or seasonal help.

I’ve worked closely with hundreds of these guys for a span of about 25 years now. Have made some great friends but none long term. They travel or on the move and their phone numbers usually never last more than a few months or a year. Probably many of them are not here legally. But, having observed things like this almost from an anthropological standpoint, I often wonder what their lifespans are. When you work that hard and don’t manage simple things like hydration how long do they really have? My guess is it skews much less than median life expectancy.

I guess I'm surprised that it's not treated as a site safety thing, rather than personal safety. No PPE = no access to the site.

I know America, and especially Texas, tends to take a more libertarian attitude - but is there really no form of mandatory building site inspection there?

Depends on the job, project, scale, etc. Typically just follow OSHA type rules but also a lot don’t. I frequently see roofers running around on roofs with no fall protection as an example. These jobs are usually done by the time an inspector would drop by. We barely have enough inspectors to keep up with the required trade work inspections. But If there’s something like a hard hat requirement or high visibility vest is required then it’s typically monitored closely and can cause major issues. These tend to be large civil or commercial projects. I do single family residential so it’s generally not applicable and no random safety inspections occur. The random stuff we get is usually the city code compliance. In the context of Phase Change Materials, I’m not aware of anything close to a mandatory PPE requirement on something like that. I don’t think many people in the trades are even aware this exists, or don’t wan the extra weight or most likely the cost associated. Some of these guys barely invest in decent tools for the trade they specialize in.

Until it becomes mandatory I doubt anything would change. The machismo factor is such that anyone that can’t deal with the heat isn’t fit for the job. They’d probably get kicked off the crew quickly. I don’t employ anyone just strictly subcontract so it’s not in my interest to force them to exceed whatever their normal PPE requirements are.

>I don’t employ anyone just strictly subcontract so it’s not in my interest to force them to exceed whatever their normal PPE requirements are.

It's aligned with your interests to have subcontractors who aren't heat drunk doing work for you. You're just not pricing it in because you never decided to look in on and optimize for the metric before.

It’s really not though. I’ve never had a quality issue from the guys I hire, that’s why I hire them. They deal with the heat incredibly well from an output perspective. Long term health implications, maybe questionable because of things like this. If I asked them to do extra, they’d charge extra and I really get nothing in exchange for it. My opinion is it’s just something they should want to do because they saw the benefits themselves. Meaning they would pay for it themselves without me specifying it. That’s kinda the subcontractor thing, they’re not employees so there’s really only so much I can ask of them before it becomes unusual and incurs a surcharge. After all, they are only working for me for 1 or 3 weeks a year. All their other bosses aren’t asking this of them. Taking it on internally would lower their margins slightly but if they’d feel better about doing their job that way, then they should do it. It should be worth it to them. Same way that if I, in my desk job, have in the past decided to invest in keyboards, monitors, office chairs, etc. even when they exceed what my employer would offer. They are creature comforts for me and I may feel an ergonomic form of PPE. I feel it’s worth the personal investment in the tools I use hours a day to get exactly what I want.

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