Florida Continues Its Assault on Labor Rights
Advocates succeeded in blunting two bills that roll back child labor laws, but the state is launching an egregious attack on worker safety.
By Paul Blest, More Perfect Union
Over the past six years, Florida has turned hard right under Gov. Ron DeSantis and the state GOP, with little in the way of formal opposition from a state Democratic Party that has been thoroughly broken. One big consequence of that domination and DeSantis’s priorities has been a full-on assault on labor protections in Florida.
The most egregious child labor bills of this session were ultimately watered down after local and national outrage, showing that even in a state captured by conservative special interests, organizing and pressure can still produce results. But Republicans did succeed in rolling back some child labor standards (with nearly unanimous Democratic support), and at the last minute passed a broad preemption bill with sweeping negative consequences for worker safety and wages.
SB 460 was portrayed as an effort to empower kids as young as 16 to start learning how to work in the roofing and construction trades. But the bill would also provide more cheap labor for contractors, and in its original form, would have allowed kids to work on roofs and structures above six feet, something that’s in clear violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act. During a hearing in January, the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Corey Simon, said he wasn’t entirely sure who’d pay the medical bills if a kid was hurt on the job, and that he didn’t know contractors often stiff employees hurt on the job.
Eventually, the bill was amended to clarify that employers wouldn’t be able to (legally, anyway) put 16-year-olds to work on roofs or scaffolding, and it passed with nearly unanimous support in both chambers. Still, as the left-leaning Florida Policy Institute pointed out, the bill’s “vague and contradictory language” means that the legislature “still risks violating federal law and putting Florida teens’ safety at risk.”
The other child labor bill, HB 49, was a more general rollback of child labor restrictions. The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Linda Chaney, notably declared that kids as young as 16 are “not children” but “youth workers,” and the bill Chaney pushed would have allowed employers to schedule those “youth workers” for more than 30 hours a week, more than six days in a row, during school hours, and more than eight hours a day even when school was the next day. It also would have banned cities and counties from passing more stringent work curfews for minors.
Republicans repeatedly shut down Democratic amendments, including one requiring employers to maintain sexual harassment records and allowing parents of minors employed in those workplaces to review them.
Chaney was targeted by protests and the bill was one of the most thoroughly covered of this session by the state press, but the full House passed the bill on a mostly party-line vote in February. By the time it got to the Senate, however, the principal sponsor there, Danny Burgess, was pointedly contrasting his version of the bill with Chaney’s, implying that he thought she and the Florida House had gone too far.
What ended up passing the Senate, and then the House again last week, did roll back some protections, most notably allowing employers to schedule 16-year-olds for more than six days in a row and exempting home-schooled and virtual students from many existing restrictions. But for the vast majority of students, many of the restrictions remain, as FPI pointed out.
In other cases, however, the anti-worker legislature did succeed in dramatically undermining labor protections. On the heels of passing last year’s law intended to bust unions for some public employees, the legislature passed a “glitch” bill that in some ways goes even further.
And last year, after a South Florida farmworker died on the hottest day on Earth in more than 40 years, Miami-Dade County began considering local heat exposure standards, because none exist at the state level. Getting ahead of the game, Florida lawmakers passed a bill that would explicitly prohibit local governments from passing ordinances requiring water, rest, and shade breaks for employees working outdoors. It also will gut local living wage ordinances. The provisions concerning wages were stripped out of the Senate bill, but they returned in the compromise bill agreed to with the House in a devastating blow to workers.
In spirit, the bill—which, like the others, has yet to be signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis—closely resembles the Texas “death star” preemption law. As Jason Garcia reported back in January, the bill was also pushed hard by the Florida Chamber of Commerce, with the help of a right-wing think tank, the Foundation for Government Accountability. (You can read more from Jason about how all of this went down in his newsletter, Seeking Rents.)
Chicago may tax the rich to fund affordable housing
Chicagoans will vote next week on a plan to raise the real estate transfer tax on million-dollar homes (while lowering it for everyone else) to fund an aggressive plan to solve the city’s urgent homelessness crisis.
A real estate lobby lawsuit nearly voided the Bring Chicago Home referendum days before voters weighed in, but the Illinois Supreme Court intervened on Wednesday and Chicagoans’ votes will count after all.
Watch our new report on this bold solution to fight homelessness:
What else is happening in the states
A push in Oregon to ban private equity and large corporations from buying up family medical practices ran out of time in the short session and died on Senate President Rob Wagner’s desk, though the effort is likely to resume next year. Read more at The Lund Report on how the bill was, as described by former Gov. John Kitzhaber, “processed to death.”
Louisiana Republicans, now with one of their own in the governor’s mansion, have filed nearly a dozen anti-union bills as this year’s legislative session begins.
The Kentucky House is advancing a GOP proposal to put a constitutional school voucher amendment on the ballot this year. Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear opposes the effort, mirrored on others around the country that will gut public school funding and redirect it to private, mostly religious schools.
Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb signed a bill that will prohibit public institutions from granting tenure to faculty who are “unlikely to foster a culture of free inquiry, free expression and intellectual diversity within the institution.” As one academic put it: “It is a ‘tenure related law’ in the same way House Un-American Activities Committee was a ‘workplace quality review board.’”
A right-to-repair bill for cell phones and other electronic devices passed the Colorado House.
What we’re reading
Maine is getting tougher on wage and labor laws | Billy Kobin, Bangor Daily News
Sometimes You Either Strike or Accept Death | Hamilton Nolan, How Things Work
Middlemen Are Profiting off the Broken US Pharma System | Helen Santoro, Jacobin
School vouchers continue momentum in state legislatures | Daniel Vock, Route Fifty
Turning the Tables In Minnesota | Harold Meyerson, The American Prospect
This is great reporting, Paul.