A measure that will ban local governments from passing heat-protection ordinances inspired strong emotions from the public Thursday, but lawmakers approved the bill backed by big business interests.
The bill also eliminates living wage ordinances that require companies that receive government contracts to pay their employees more than the state’s minimum wage (currently $12 an hour), according to Fort Myers Republican Rep. Tiffany Esposito, the bill sponsor.
But it was the provision removing local governments from passing ordinances to provide outdoor workers with protections that inspired one speaker in a committee hearing to break down in tears.
“To me this bill is not about numbers, it’s about millions of Floridians and it is very personal,” said Lake Worth resident Laura Munoz with the organization Florida Student Power. She told the members of the House Commerce Committee that her father had died in a workplace accident related to a combination of unsafe working conditions and years of poor heat protections.
“OSHA failed us,” she said, referring to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration that regulates workplace safety. “The private market and private employers failed us. And I am here to ask you did my father not deserve better? Did I not deserve better? How much profit was worth his life, and how much profits are worth their lives? Because I don’t think there’s money enough to ever be worth it. And you know what? Nobody can bring my father back. But what you can do to help us heal is to make sure that’s nobody has to go through this, and that’s all I’m asking you. Is that too much to ask?”
Esposito said the proposal was “people centric,” and said that she was very sensitive to concerns about the heat, mentioning that her husband works in the outdoors in the construction industry.
Her bill was filed last fall, right around the time that the Miami-Dade County Commission was set to vote on a local ordinance that would protect outdoor workers in the agriculture and construction industries which if passed, would be the first law of its kind on the South. However, in November the commission opted to delay the vote until March of 2024. That proposal was introduced after at least two farmworkers died from excessive heat in South Florida earlier last year.
The measure moving in the Legislature this year has the strong backing of some of the state’s most powerful business interests, who claim that allowing counties such as Miami-Dade to implement such heat ordinances is bad public policy.
“Accidents are more likely to happen where there’s inconsistencies in regulations and uncertainty of expectations,” said Carol Bowen, the president and CEO of the Florida chapter of Associated Builders and Contractors. “If you allow a circumstance where different jurisdictions can take a different version of a safety environment and tweak it to meet their needs, you risk employers being uncertain when they do work in that area as to what the expectations are and that’s when accidents happen.”
The business community is also lined up strongly behind the provision that would prohibit cities and counties from creating “livable wage” ordinances for their contractors and subcontractors, ordinances which are now in effect in 11 local governments in the state to combat higher living costs.
“Prevailing wages artificially increase the cost of the contract,” said Carolyn Johnson with the Florida Chamber of Commerce. “That will price smaller businesses from being able to actually compete or try to work with their local governments, and it also increases the costs to the taxpayer.”
But North Miami-Dade County Democratic Rep. Dotie Joseph blasted the proposal, saying that her GOP colleagues were being negligent in taking away Miami-Dade’s or any other local government’s ability to protect outdoor workers.
“When local governments try to do something about it, so that it doesn’t happen again, here we show up at the state level and say, ‘no, we don’t mind a couple of more people dying.'” she said. “That’s basically what we’re saying, functionally. So we’re okay with workers dying.”
Joseph then criticized how Collier County Republican Bob Rommel, the committee chair, had ran the meeting. Rommel told the speakers discussing the issue that they would only have one minute to speak, despite the fact that with many of the opponents declining to speak publicly, there actually was still plenty of time for those who did choose to speak before the five-hour meeting was scheduled to conclude.
“For people to live from wherever they came from, to take the time to try to engage in our civic discourse, especially when you hear about the deaths. I think it’s problematic. But I’ll just leave that there. But that could have been done better. And another thing that could have been done better is instead of cutting people off, giving them a 30-second, 10-second,” Joseph said, before Rommel cut her off.
“If you want to debate the bill, debate the bill. Not the way I run the committee,” he snapped.
After the meeting, the bill opponents were still angry, saying the lawmakers showed a lack of respect.
“As you can see there’s 40 minutes left to this meeting and yet everybody was cut off in testimony,” said Yenisbel Vilorio, with the group State Innovation Exchange Action. “A lot of these people traveled very far from the state, drove eight plus hours to get here – they lost wages. They have to deal with childcare just to be able to address Florida legislators, the one time of the year that they’re able to do that, and for them to not give us time to speak…for them to be so incredibly dismissive of the public which consistently happens in this process, more people need to be aware of it.”
The proposal will now go to the full House for a vote.
The Senate version (SB 1492) has one more committee hearing before it goes before the floor of that chamber.