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By Steve Wishnia

Florida’s legislature has passed a broad pre-emption bill that will prohibit local governments from enacting heat-safety regulations or requiring their contractors to pay more than the state’s $12-an-hour minimum wage.

The measure, House Bill 433, would even forbid mandating that employers put up a poster urging workers to “drink water,” Esteban Wood, policy director for WeCount!, a worker center for agricultural, construction, and domestic workers in South Florida, told Work-Bites.

“It handcuffs local officials from even addressing the issue on an educational basis,” he says. “It’s a way of maintaining state control over labor regulations and working conditions.”

The bill was passed by both the state House and Senate on March 8, the last day of the legislative session. It has not yet been sent to Governor Ron DeSantis. Once he receives it, he will have 15 days to sign it, veto it, or let it become law without his signature.

The heat-safety bans would go into effect July 1. They would prohibit any local regulations “to control an employee's exposure to heat or sun, or to otherwise address or moderate the effects of such exposure.” Those include standards for water consumption; cooling measures; posting or distributing notices or materials “which inform employees how to protect themselves from such exposure”; and “appropriate first-aid measures or emergency responses related to heat exposure.” It would also forbid local governments to consider safety standards while selecting contractors.

Beginning in the fall of 2026, the legislation would also prohibit local governments from setting any terms or conditions of employment that exceed federal or state law, and from using wages and benefits as criteria to select vendors, contractors, or service providers. This would void the living-wage laws in Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach counties, prevent prevailing-wage agreements on public-works projects, and bar “predictive scheduling” rules, in which employers must give workers advance notice of their work hours.

The bill has already caused the Miami-Dade County Commission to cancel a vote scheduled for March 19 on a measure that would require employers to give outdoor farm and construction workers 10-minute breaks every two hours.

On March 11, Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava sent DeSantis a letter urging him to veto HB 433, along with another bill, HB 705, which would extend the state’s ban on prevailing-wage agreements to locally funded construction projects.

“This legislation undermines our liberty to strengthen our local economy, hurts our small businesses, and keeps our residents from potential job opportunities and good wages,” she wrote. The two bills, she said, would end the county’s Living Wage Program, which sets a minimum wage of about $20 an hour for roughly 9,000 workers at county contractors; its Responsible Wages program, covering about 9,500 on county-funded or county-owned construction projects; and other programs to prioritize hiring local construction contractors and workers.

The Farmworkers Association of Florida is also planning to launch a veto campaign. Jeannie Economos, the Apopka-based group’s health and safety project coordinator, says it’s “unconscionable” that “one of the hottest states in the country” can’t protect workers.

“Pressure from business interests often speaks louder than loyalty to constituents,” the Miami Herald wrote in an editorial, singling out the Florida Chamber of Commerce, which pushed for HB 433. “We elect officials in South Florida and elsewhere in the state to solve problems for our community, only to see that authority chiseled away by a partisan state Legislature.”

Miami-Dade County has about 327,000 outdoor workers, according to WeCount!, with more than 100,000 in agriculture, construction, and landscaping. The group, based in Homestead — on the border between Miami’s southern suburbs and a fruit and winter-vegetable farming area — has campaigned for heat-safety legislation for more than three years, under the slogan “Agua, Sombra, Descanso” (Water, Shade, Rest).

According to state Department of Health figures, 23 people in Florida died from heat-related injuries in the summer of 2021, and 684 were hospitalized, including 40 in Miami-Dade. In Miami-Dade, according to county figures, the number of emergency-room visits for heat-related ailments peaked at 65 a week last summer, twice as high as in any of the previous five years.

Those numbers don’t show the full picture, says Economos. “People don’t know how many hospitalizations there really are,” she says. Symptoms of heat injuries can resemble other ailments; health-care providers don’t always ask about work; and there’s a communication barrier for immigrants whose main language is Spanish or Haitian Creole. For example, she says, when someone exposed to pesticides says they’re “intoxicado,” that means “poisoned” in Spanish, not “drunk.”

They also don’t include the toll of chronic diseases, Economos adds: Being frequently dehydrated can cause chronic kidney disease.

The bill’s sponsor, representative Tiffany Esposito (R-Fort Myers), did not return phone calls to her Tallahassee and district offices. But she told a House Regulatory Reform & Economic Development subcommittee hearing in January that the bill would “protect good jobs.”

“Local governments are requiring employers to pay more, and pay maybe more than what the market can allow, and we're requiring them to offer a certain amount of benefits,” she said. “All that’s doing is driving up the cost of doing business, which ultimately ends on the consumer.”

Asked if nullifying local living-wage standards would cut workers’ pay, Esposito answered, “Maybe… It’s up to the prerogative of the employer.”

Neither Florida nor the federal government have regulations covering workplace heat exposure. The bill directs the state Department of Commerce to establish such rules — but not until after July 1, 2028, if the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration has not adopted national regulations by then.

“Last year was the hottest year on record in South Florida,” Wood says. In June and July, temperatures in the Miami area exceeded 100° for 46 consecutive days — far surpassing the old record of 32 days, from 2020.

Wood notes ironically that in 2020, the legislature unanimously passed heat-safety regulations for high-school athletes. That law was inspired by the death of a 16-year-old football player in Fort Myers in 2017.