Florida abandoned workplace safety for its public employees and attacked their unions instead

Tens of thousands of state and municipal employees in Florida have lost their union representation — and their union contracts — this year, due to consequences of a  “reform” law approved in 2023.  And while the issue is little-discussed, one clear example of the law's impact is its potential to undermine the few workplace health and safety protections that Florida’s public sector has in large part historically been excluded from.

It started 50 years ago.

Under the federal Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970, millions of workers in Florida’s private sector — which make up the majority of the state’s workforce — are covered by basic health and safety regulations that are meant to help protect people from injury, illness, and death on the job.

Thanks to OSHA, workers have a right to protections such as the information and training for chemical hazards in the workplace, safety equipment like respirators, and a workplace that is “free from recognized hazards that are causing or are likely to cause death or serious physical harm.”

But there’s a glaring loophole baked into the law that has never been fixed: It doesn’t cover state, city or county employees.

In Florida, that means the federal government doesn’t have authority to require or enforce basic workplace safety protections for the more than 900,000 employees in local and state government, including the public employees who fix malfunctioning traffic lights, pick up your trash, drive your kids to school, and clear debris and fix power lines after major storms.

Labor unions, for their part, can negotiate protective language into union contracts for public employees who are exempted from OSHA's federal protections, and many— including the Laborers' International Union of North America and the Service Employees International Union — have.


According to Ronnie Burris, a former wastewater treatment employee of 25 years and union official for LiUNA Local 630 in Jacksonville, all of his local’s municipal contracts — covering certain groups of workers employed by Orlando, Jacksonville, Cocoa Beach and other cities — contain explicit requirements for the public employer to “comply with federal, state, and local legislation concerning safety, health, sanitation, and working conditions.”

“That’s been negotiated in all the contracts,” Burris told Orlando Weekly in a phone call.

In practice, he explained, this means if an employer did violate federal OSHA regulations, the affected employee wouldn’t be able to go to OSHA, since the federal agency doesn’t have jurisdiction. But they would have the right to file a grievance through their union over a breach of their union contract.

That, Burris confirmed, is the union difference. “If they’re non-union, then I'm not sure that [the employer] have to follow anything.”

As of last year, less than one-third of Florida's public sector had union representation according to federal data, and even that low number has taken a drastic nosedive.

In the wake of a union “reform” law approved by the GOP-controlled state Legislature and Florida Gov. DeSantis last year, more than 68,000 public employees in Florida — including thousands represented by LiUNA — have so far lost their union contracts , as well as the certification from the state that would allow their unions to negotiate new ones. Cops and firefighters were excluded from the new law, so their unions weren't decertified.

Burris's Local 630 recently lost certification (and contracts) for 11 public sector unions, as a result of the law, covering over 1,700 employees in Florida altogether.

These now-dissolved unions provided negotiating power for mechanics and other trades workers at the Orlando International Airport, as well as certain groups of workers employed by the cities of Melbourne, Atlantic Beach, Jacksonville Beach, Edgewater, and employees of Levy, Breward, Columbia, Alachua and Nassau counties.

Some of these unions were established decades ago. The union at Orlando International Airport, governed by the Greater Orlando Aviation Authority, was first certified in 1977. The now-defunct union in Alachua County — formerly representing over 200 employees, from janitors to tax clerks and equipment operators — was certified the same year.

“Most municipalities want to keep their employees safe,” Burris allowed. But without any sort of mandate or regulation in place, he said, there is no authority forcing employers to abide by or respect the same rules afforded to private sector employees under OSHA, and the state government doesn't require similar protections either.

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Deadly consequences

Even union representation has its limitations, however. The general lack of OSHA coverage for Florida's public sector laid the groundwork for a deadly explosion in Daytona Beach back in 2006, which eventually led to a federal investigation.
Three union-represented city employees were working on the roof of the Bethune Wastewater Treatment Plant in Daytona, damaged from recent hurricanes, unaware that they were working above a massive methanol tank.

Sparks from a cutting torch the men used to remove parts of the damaged roof ignited methanol vapors from the tank, creating an explosion and a “fireball on top of the tank,” according to the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board’s report.

All three employees were swallowed by flames. One worker, 43-year-old Michael Martin, managed to survive with severe injuries, while the two others — 59-year old Eric Johnson and 40-year-old Clyde Jones — died from the devastating incident, later deemed preventable.

The federal board noted in its investigative findings that Daytona Beach had “no program to evaluate the safety of non-routine tasks” and there was “no evidence” to suggest the employees who died that day had received any methanol hazard training in the past 10 years. Jones' family later filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the city, and his widow called on state leaders and Congress to establish greater protections.

But it was clear this wasn't just a city of Daytona Beach problem. “No state or federal oversight of public employee safety exists in the State of Florida,” the federal board noted, bluntly, in its findings.

The investigation board recommended in its 2007 report that Florida lawmakers and the governor (then-Republican Charlie Crist) enact legislation to implement policies “covering the workplace health and safety of Florida public employees that are at least as effective as OSHA.”

Nearly 20 years later, this has not happened.

Some municipal governments — including Orange County — have voluntarily adopted health and safety programs that follow OSHA standards. But some safety officials have admitted that simply adopting these programs may not be enough.

During that investigation into the 2006 wastewater treatment plant incident, Brian Berke, an employee safety manager for Palm Beach County at the time, testified that his county’s voluntarily created health and safety program reflected its “strong responsibility” to provide a safe work environment for county employees.

“Extreme pressures,” however — such as “cost-cutting” — “could be brought to bear on even our program in the future,” Berke admitted. “It is my belief that only mandatory regulatory requirements, whether coming from a state or federal level, are needed to support and nurture safety efforts within the public sector.”

Marc Brody, then a union official for AFSCME Council 79 — which represented the workers at the treatment plant — agreed. Brody, the union’s director of education, described OSHA's public sector loophole as “scandalous” in his own testimony.

“Many public-sector unions, including ours, have tried to include safety language in our contracts,” Brody said. But the problem, he added, was that in many cases, this language “has really no teeth, and you have no way to back it with administrative criminal sanctions and violations.”

A failure to opt in

The public sector “loophole” has been around since OSHA was first established half a century ago, and efforts to close it (dating back decades) have so far been unsuccessful .

The 50-year-old law does offer the option for states like Florida to opt in their public sector workers, by creating a state OSHA plan with standards that are at least as effective as federal standards. Adopting a state plan, a move that can also serve to bolster compliance for the private sector, was another recommendation of the federal board that investigated the deadly 2006 accident in Daytona Beach.

Only about half of states in the U.S. have created their own state OSHA plans, however, excluding an estimated 7.9 million public employees in the country from OSHA’s protections.

Florida, a state that’s home to the third-largest workforce in the U.S., has never created a comprehensive state OSHA program.

In Florida, the lack of a state program leaves enforcement for the state’s much larger private sector fully up to a very limited number of federal OSHA investigators. As of 2021, Florida had only 53 federal OSHA compliance regulators to enforce protections for over 8.4 million workers in Florida’s private sector.

According to federal data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, analyzed by the AFL-CIO, however, public employers have in recent years reported higher injury rates . In 2022, state and local public sector employers reported a combined injury rate of 4.9 per 100 workers, compared to a reported rate of 2.7 per 100 workers in the private sector.

Florida’s Republican leaders, believe it or not, briefly flirted with the idea of creating a state plan in 2021. But the proposal to explore this option ultimately led nowhere and has seemingly been abandoned.

During a brief state legislative special session that fall, the Republican-controlled Legislature passed a controversial bill ( HB 5-B ) that was pitched as an effort to withdraw from federal OSHA oversight and establish a state plan to alternatively enforce workplace regulations for Floridians in the public and private sectors.

The proposal, approved by state lawmakers along party lines with Republicans in favor, emerged only after OSHA had issued a rule — later blocked by the U.S. Supreme Court — that would have placed a COVID-19 vaccination requirement on workers at large employers.

The Florida bill — later described as “theater” by lone GOP dissenter Jeff Brandes — gave the Governor’s Office $1 million to come up with a proposal for state OSHA plan, and to provide a status report to leaders of the Florida House and Senate by January 17, 2022.

The report released that January ultimately estimated that the process of taking over federal oversight would take up to nine years, and would require the state to establish a new state agency. Such an endeavor would be costly, and would still have required the state to offer the bare minimum oversight that OSHA does (and enforce the same rules).

The January 2022 status report, signed by a DeSantis staffer, added that it’s “too early” to definitively determine if the plan would be prudent. Despite a vague commitment to provide a “detailed timeline” and an estimation of required resources, there is no evidence of such a plan actually moving forward.

Dr. Rich Templin, chief lobbyist for Florida's largest federation of labor unions — the Florida AFL-CIO — said the GOP's plan was insincere from the start.

“Our position was, if you guys want to do this, we're not opposed to it, but bring everybody to the table,” Templin told Orlando Weekly . “But that's not what they wanted. They just wanted headlines.”

“Did they just abandon it? Yes,” he shared bluntly. “They just let it go. They got their headlines, and they just let it go.”

A request for an update sent by Orlando Weekly to the Governor’s Office has been unreturned as of publication.

A pattern of deregulation

Beyond basic safety regulation, Florida has lacked a state Department of Labor entirely since 2002, after the Florida legislature approved a plan at the behest of then-Gov. Jeb Bush to abolish it.

Most programs and services in that department were passed off to other departments or agencies, but some — including minimum wage enforcement and a now-defunct workplace safety division — were not.

Before Florida’s elected leaders dissolved the labor department, that department had for a time housed a Division of Safety, created under the Florida Occupational Safety and Health Act.

The division offered more protections afforded to state and municipal employees today, both establishing and enforcing state standards on workplace health and safety from at least 1993 to 2000. Violations of these standards were subject to a penalty of up to $50,000 per violation, according to state records.

Motivated by a national move by conservative leaders toward cost reduction and decentralization, however, Florida’s state leaders decided to repeal the Florida OSH Act in 1999, effectively dissolving the division and laying off nearly 100 staff in the process, according to former union official Brody.

Just a few years later, state leaders got rid of the state labor department altogether, following a years-long push by Jeb Bush, who directed the state to identify workforce programs that could be “ eliminated, consolidated, or privatized .”

Today, labor unions in Florida can help fill some gaps in protection, but limitations in enforcement and a lack of resources persist.

Business lobbyists for major employers of largely private sector workers in the tourism industry and construction trades have pushed state leaders in Florida to deregulate child labor and to prevent local governments from guaranteeing workers access to certain workplace protections — including protection from extreme heat on the job.

AFSCME, one of the largest public sector unions in the state, recently adopted a resolution at its national convention that represents a commitment to try and negotiate contracts that offer protections from exposure to extreme heat, specifically.

As temperatures in some of the hottest states and communities in the U.S. surge, the Biden administration recently released a proposed federal standard to help protect workers from extreme heat, mandating certain rights for workers once temperatures on the job exceed 80 degrees.

But even if the administration does manage to finalize and implement that rule — the process is expected to take years, and could be scrapped under a Trump administration — that standard still wouldn’t cover state and municipal workers in states like Florida and Texas that don’t have state OSHA plans.

Bipartisan legislation recently introduced at the federal level in June — sponsored by Congressman Chris Deluzio (D-PA) and Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) — could change that, but it's unclear if there will be enough political will to push it near or past the finish line.

“Our dedicated public sector workers throughout our country deserve to be safe at work and the robust level of protection that OSHA coverage provides,” said U.S. Rep. Fitzpatrick in a news release.

“Congressman Deluzio and I are committed to protecting hardworking public servants throughout our nation’s communities, and I implore my colleagues to join us in this vital effort to safeguard workers.”

This story has been updated to clarify the use of the term "withdraw" in regards to HB 5-B (2021).
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