Once again, Florida lawmakers ignore attempts to fight wage theft

Florida hasn’t had a state labor department in over 20 years, nor a statewide mechanism to combat wage theft, and a repeat attempt by Democrats to reestablish one during this year’s legislative session was ignored for a fourth year in a row.

Florida Rep. Angie Nixon, D-Jacksonville, filed a bill last November that sought to re-establish a state Department of Labor. This is a department that most states in the U.S. have, but which was dissolved in Florida by Florida lawmakers and former Gov. Jeb Bush in 2002 as his administration instead chose to identify programs that could be “ eliminated, consolidated, or privatized .”

The process of the department’s decentralization was initiated during the 1999 legislative session. Its eventual abolition was accomplished through the passage of several bills in the years after, including a bill during the 2000 session — a reportedly tumultuous affair which left state legislators “tense, tired, and often in tears,” according to the Sun-Sentinel .

Jacksonville Rep. Nixon and Orlando Sen. Victor Torres — a former Lynx bus driver and self-described “labor guy” — have filed legislation to re-create a state labor department or agency every year since 2021, each time without any luck.

Their legislation has been ignored and kicked to the wayside, denied even the dignity of a single committee hearing by their mostly Republican colleagues, who outnumber Democrats in the state Legislature more than two to one.

This year was no different. Except that Nixon withdrew her original bill to reestablish a state labor department and instead pushed for the development of a state Division of Labor Standards — a more practical proposal, perhaps. Torres matched the move with his own bill filed in the Senate.

Under their bills, the state would have been directed to create a division within the Department of Commerce empowered to meaningfully enforce Florida’s minimum wage, and to “investigate and ascertain the wages of persons employed in any occupation or place of employment in the state as the division finds necessary and proper.”

According to disclosure reports, the only lobbyists who bothered registering to track the bill were four lobbyists for the Florida Chamber of Commerce — a powerful and deep-pocketed business lobbying group that broadly opposes wage mandates .

The cost of creating such a division is unclear, because the bill has never been subject to a staff analysis — that's reserved for bills that get a hearing.

The overall costs of lacking a state labor department are also unquantified, but can be seen at the very least in the lack of state action taken to combat wage theft — best explained as the failure of an employer to pay an employee what they are lawfully owed. This can include wages, overtime compensation, and tips, but it can also occur in the form of misclassification — when an employer incorrectly identifies and treats an employee as a contractor — or denying an employee mandatory breaks.

Wage theft violations are most frequently discovered in the food service, construction, healthcare and retail industries, according to the U.S. Department of Labor — which helps enforce wage and hour laws in Florida, but is incapable of serving as a replacement for a state enforcement mechanism.

Women, people of color and immigrants, who are over-represented in Florida’s low-wage jobs, are particularly vulnerable to being cheated of pay by law-breaking employers.

When Florida’s state labor department was dissolved, so too was a state agency empowered to investigate complaints of wage theft in a state that now boasts a labor force of over 11 million.

While some programs in the state labor department were handed off to other agencies or not-for-profits with its dissolution, a mechanism for enforcing wage and hour laws was not.

The Wild West of labor law

Today, Florida still doesn’t have any kind of state department or agency that is authorized to crack down on wage theft — unless you make minimum wage.

The Florida Attorney General’s Office, currently led by Republican Attorney General Ashley Moody, is empowered to investigate cases of minimum wage violations only — and public records show even this occurs rarely.

Kylie Mason, communications director for the Attorney General’s Office, confirmed to Orlando Weekly that the office recovered wages for exactly one working adult in 2023 — just about $500 for a Hungry Howie’s delivery driver in Pasco County who was paid a sub-minimum wage.

Emails that Orlando Weekly obtained through a public records request show the franchise owner of the pizza spot failed to raise minimum pay for her tipped delivery drivers when the minimum wage increased on Sept. 30, 2022, from $6.98 per hour to $7.98 per hour for tipped employees.

Under a ballot referendum approved by Florida voters in 2020, the minimum wage is set to rise $1 each year on Sept. 30 through Sept. 30, 2026. Today the tipped minimum wage is $8.98 per hour, and $12 per hour for nontipped employees.

The Hungry Howie's owner played dumb in email communications with the Attorney General’s Office, which gently reminded her that in addition to raising minimum pay for the driver who filed a complaint, she’d best do the same for her other delivery drivers, too.

“I recommend that you make private efforts to remedy any other employees whose wages were similarly underpaid to avoid further complaints being levied against you,” warned Rebecca Snyder, an attorney in the Attorney General Office's consumer protection division.

In addition to sending warnings to employers, the office is also authorized under law to bring a civil action, seek injunctive relief, and impose a fine of $1,000 per offense, payable to the state, for willful violations.

Even this single action to recover wages, however, is somewhat exceptional for the Attorney General’s Office — which serves as the only statewide option for recovering unpaid wages beyond taking private civil action.

Although the office has taken an aggressive position on retail theft — and more recently , Starbucks’ diversity, equity and inclusion policies — it doesn’t openly advertise its ability to recover unpaid wages for those who are denied Florida’s minimum wage.

In fact, there’s little to no evidence that the Attorney General’s Office previously recovered a single cent through direct enforcement actions.

“The minimum wage has largely been unenforced for, really, as long as Florida's had a minimum wage,” Alexis Tsoukalas, a policy analyst for the Florida Policy Institute who's extensively researched the issue, told Orlando Weekly . Florida's minimum wage — previously tied to the federal standard — was first established through a ballot referendum in 2004.

Moody’s top-cop predecessor Pam Bondi, a longtime Donald Trump ally who more recently served as a defense lawyer for the former president during his first impeachment trial, even sided with business groups over workers in efforts to combat wage theft.

Today, the office that doesn't advertise its ability to recover unpaid pay for the state's lowest-paid workers receives few complaints. Over email, Mason told Orlando Weekly that the Attorney General’s office received exactly 12 complaints of minimum wage violations in 2023.

Eight of those cases have been closed, with four still under review as of early April. Four of the closed cases, per Mason, were complaints related to other forms of wage theft, while another case was settled privately. Another person was unresponsive, and another had filed their complaint anonymously, which isn’t allowed if you want to recover unpaid wages.

Only one person — the Hungry Howie's driver — recovered wages with the Attorney General Office’s help. The whole process took about eight months from when the driver filed the complaint in March to when he confirmed with the office over email in November that he'd received a check for $544.29 in owed wages from his panicked employer.

Several people who filed complaints with the Attorney General’s office last year, including the Hungry Howie's driver, shared that they had also contacted the federal Department of Labor for help.

One woman said in her complaint that the feds had referred her to the state AG’s office because she makes more than the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, but was paid below Florida’s minimum, which is several dollars higher.

This is one of the gaps in state enforcement that the federal government can't fill.

Another woman — a restaurant employee — also said her case was denied by the feds, with a federal investigator citing their “current workload” and a statute of limitations on federal wage and hour cases as an excuse.

A spokesperson for the U.S. labor department’s Wage and Hour Division told Orlando Weekly in April that their division recovered over $16.8 million in back wages and damages for more than 11,000 workers in Florida last fiscal year and assessed employers over $1 million in additional civil monetary penalties.

The spokesperson added, however, that there are currently over 9,000 employees in Florida for whom their division has money waiting to be claimed from the last three years of wage theft cases.

“The agency makes every effort to locate and notify all employees who are due back wages. If we cannot find an employee, we hold their back wages for three years while we continue our efforts to locate them,” the spokesperson wrote in an email.

“After three years, if we remain unable to find the person, we are required to send the money to the U.S. Treasury.”

Satisfied with the bare minimum

Florida isn’t the only state that does a poor job in cracking down on wage theft through its own means. Blue states like California and New York — both of which have state labor departments — have also faced scrutiny in recent years over their ability to ensure employers pay up.

Still, a 2017 report from the Economic Policy Institute found that, out of the 10 most populous states, minimum wage workers were least likely to be paid the bare minimum in Florida, with wage theft affecting an estimated one in four of Florida's low-wage workers — our neighbors, friends and family members.

Nationwide, the report found that employers are estimated to steal billions from workers every year through various forms of wage theft.

In the absence of a state mechanism, some cities and counties in Florida have stepped up to create their own local wage recovery programs.  Osceola County — an area with a majority Hispanic population south of Orlando — launched its modest wage recovery program in 2015.

An annual report shared with county commissioners shows that, through direct county efforts and hearings, employers were ordered to pay out nearly $80,000 to eight workers from March 2023 to March 2024 who had filed complaints with the county.

The county program received 27 complaints of wage theft during that timeframe, and 11 of those still remained open as of March. Nine others were identified as “deficient,” one was withdrawn or dismissed, and five complaints were settled privately.

Through the organizing efforts of mostly labor and immigrant rights groups, similar programs have been established in a half-dozen other counties, including Hillsborough, Pinellas, Palm Beach, Alachua, Broward and Miami-Dade.

Republican state leaders, however, haven’t appeared interested in addressing the issue, and most Democrats — who have little voting power in Florida’s GOP-dominated state Legislature on their own — generally don’t bring it up that often either.

The Florida Chamber of Commerce — a powerful business lobbying group — has also openly celebrated legislators’ neglect of bills like Nixon’s.

In their 2024 legislative recap , the Chamber reported to its members that Nixon’s Division of Labor Standards bill was “defeated” — a very good thing in their view, because the Chamber had opposed it. As the Chamber saw it, the creation of such a division would negatively impact Florida’s “business-friendly climate” by establishing “new layers of government bureaucracy that interfere in the employer-employee relationship."

The Chamber also helped draft a bill this year that will block cities and counties from maintaining or enacting wage and benefit mandates for employers they enter into contracts with, effective Sept. 30, 2026.

Such mandates — known as local “living wage” ordinances — generally require local government contractors to pay their employees a pay rate that’s a few dollars more than Florida’s legal minimum of $12 an hour. The bill also blocks local governments from requiring employers to adopt heat safety policies for outdoor laborers, as well as those who work indoors with few or no cooling measures, like warehouse workers.

According to emails Orlando Weekly obtained through a separate request, filed post-session, the bill was a priority of the “entire business community” in Florida.

“HEAT cannot die,” wrote Carol Bowen, lobbyist for the Associated Builders and Contractors in Florida, in a text message to the Florida House’s chief of staff the night before the last day of the legislative session. “The entire business community is in lock step on this.”

The bill was one of the last to pass the next day.

The Chamber, and other business lobbying groups, have sought to ban local wage recovery programs like Osceola County’s through similar preemption legislation.

Such preemption bills date back to at least 2011, one year after Miami-Dade County established the very first local wage recovery program in the state.

Businesses complained following its initial passage, and the Florida Retail Federation even sued, unsuccessfully, to have the law invalidated. Within less than three years, the program reportedly ordered employers to pay more than $1.5 million in back wages to workers who had been cheated of pay.

Sen. Torres, who is term-limited from running for reelection this fall, told Orlando Weekly that he was proud to file bills over the last four years to reestablish a state agency to help address pressing labor issues. But with a disinterested GOP majority, he believes the makeup of the state Legislature needs to change before such an effort can really move forward.

“Let's get this straight, there is zero appetite from the majority party to meaningfully increase worker protections and that won't change until the legislature changes,” Torres told Orlando Weekly in a statement.  “In one of the hottest states in the country, the legislature has gone as far as preventing local governments from implementing their own heat protections for workers, and has now deeply weakened child labor laws in our state.”

A state labor department, he added, “would be able to enforce the few worker protections we do have, help protect against wage theft, and finally be a state advocate to help workers settle disputes."

This story was first published at our sibling paper Orlando Weekly.

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