Florida lawmakers are advancing cookie-cutter legislation from the American Legislative Exchange Council, a corporate-funded “bill mill,” that would incentivize private sector employers to make it harder for their employees to form a union.
The legislation (SB 1236/HB 1387) was approved by two panels of state lawmakers along party lines this week. It would disqualify employers, or otherwise withhold state economic development incentives — such as tax refunds, rebates, and tax credits — from employers that agree to remain neutral during a union organizing campaign or grant a union voluntary recognition.
Under the federal National Labor Relations Act, there are two ways for workers in the private sector to form a union. Workers can go through what’s known as a card-check (or voluntary recognition process), or through an election process.
The former involves presenting an employer with signed cards in support of unionization from more than 50 percent of the workforce. If the employer, in a show of good faith, is satisfied that most workers want to form a union, the employer can then grant voluntary union recognition. This is the more expedient option of forming a union.
The other method of unionization — by going through an election process with the National Labor Relations Board — can take months, and thus may allow an anti-union employer more time to intimidate workers, retaliate against union leaders in the workplace (see Starbucks and Amazon as examples), or bring in professional “union avoidance” consultants paid hundreds of dollars an hour to dissuade workers from voting in favor of unionization.
State lawmakers themselves can’t directly change federal law to make it harder for workers in the private sector to form unions, because that’s under federal jurisdiction. But they can indirectly make it harder for private sector workers to form unions by threatening employers with the loss of economic incentives — or at least, they can try.
Critics have argued this type of policy is preempted by federal law, which gives employers the right to grant a union voluntary recognition if they believe it is the right thing to do for themselves and their employees.
The stakes for employers that play nice with unions, if this legislation were to pass, is high. According to the Florida Department of Commerce, the state incentives program paid out $16.4 million in incentives in the 2024 fiscal year and about $12.6 million in 2025.
“This is Big Government telling private businesses what to do”
Nicholas Mangoni, a private sector union member and trades worker from Gainesville, argued during public testimony on the bills, “This is Big Government telling private businesses what to do.”
Sen. Carlos Guillermo Smith (D-Orlando), during a hearing on the proposal in the Senate Commerce & Tourism Committee, described it as “creative union busting.”
“The bill is compelling employer speech in the form of their freedom to not speak and be neutral, which is a violation of their First Amendment rights,” Smith said.
In addition to blacklisting companies that grant voluntary union recognition, the proposal would also prohibit employers from signing a neutrality agreement during an organizing drive — also known as a labor peace agreement — if the employer wants to receive a state economic incentive. A neutrality agreement is basically what it sounds like: an agreement to remain neutral during an organizing drive and not try to sway workers one way or another.
Sen. Ralph Massullo, the Senate sponsor of SB 1236, incorrectly stated during a committee hearing Wednesday that his bill would actually require neutrality agreements from employers in order to receive incentives. In fact, that’s something union advocates would support.
After being pressed for clarification by Sen. Smith, however, Massullo took more than 20 seconds to silently re-read his bill and ultimately admitted he misspoke.
“I was incorrect. You are correct,” Massullo told Smith, an ally of organized labor who has been endorsed by unions. “They cannot have that in place.”
What does voluntary recognition look like?
Most of Florida’s workforce — roughly 94 percent — doesn’t have union representation. But hundreds of thousands of workers in the Sunshine State, from theme park workers to construction workers and cops, do and are covered by contracts that guarantee things such as annual wage increases, affordable health insurance plans, workplace safety protections, and protection against being fired for no reason.
Examples of an employer granting voluntary recognition to a union, especially in Florida — where unions are less common — is rarer, but it’s not unheard of. Airport workers at Orlando International Airport’s Delta Air lounge, employed by Sodexo Magic, for instance formed their union with Unite Here Local 362 last year through voluntary union recognition. So did Delta Air Lounge workers at Tampa International Airport, also represented by Local 362, who are getting ready to negotiate their first union contract, a union representative confirmed.
Nationally, employers like Ben & Jerry’s, clothing retailer H&M, and Forever Energy have agreed to enter into neutrality agreements with organizing workers, voluntarily showing they don’t want to tell workers whether or not they should form a union.
Voluntary union recognition, allowing workers to form a union without an election process, has also been granted by employers such as the iHeartPodcast Network, Microsoft, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) Los Angeles, and Code for America.
In the building and construction trades, contractors also often source their labor through unions, according to Dr. Rich Templin, political director of the Florida AFL-CIO. Trades workers this week warned Florida lawmakers that, if this legislation passes, their jobs could be on the line.
“My livelihood relies on the success of our local contractors to secure work for us,” said Shane Tremblay, a construction electrician from Jacksonville, speaking before the Senate Commerce & Tourism Committee on Wednesday. “If this bill were to pass, our contractors would be punished simply for trying to find or trying to use the local workforce that works under a collective bargaining agreement that’s been voluntarily recognized as such.”
A couple of copycats
This kind of legislation isn’t novel. In fact the proposal — similar to legislation signed into law in Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia in recent years — is modeled after the American Legislative Exchange Council’s “Taxpayer Dollars Protect Workers Act.”
The American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, notoriously acts as a network of right-wing think tanks and corporate lobbyists that feed draft legislation to state lawmakers across the country to file in state legislatures as their own. Florida House speaker Danny Perez is a former national chair of the organization.
Florida Rep. Toby Overdorf, the sponsor of the House version of the Florida proposal, explicitly described his bill Thursday as the “Taxpayer Dollars Protect Workers Act” during its first committee stop, directly referencing the ALEC policy template.
He and Massullo argue, in contrast to their critics, that the bill would protect workers by giving them a chance to vote on unionization instead of exposing them to potential coercion by an organizer to sign a card in support of unionization.
“We’re just saying that if we’re going to give tax incentives, we will choose those companies that have unionized through secret ballot because we believe that gives the workers the most protection,” Massullo said.
They presented no evidence of any coercion actually occurring, but insisted it was a concern they felt was necessary to address. The only member of the public who spoke in support of the legislation this week, who expressed similar concerns, was labor attorney David Osborne, the former CEO of a right-wing, anti-union organization known as Americans for Fair Treatment.
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Osborne, based out of Jacksonville, said he was speaking this week as a representative of Workers for Opportunity, an anti-union arm of the Michigan-based Mackinac Center for Public Policy that similarly lobbied for anti-union reforms to Florida’s public sector labor laws in 2023 and 2024.
Osborne, notably, is not formally registered as a lobbyist for Workers for Opportunity, potentially skirting state lobbying disclosure requirements.
“The union is allowed to recruit, make promises, and with card check, actually coerce individual employees into signing cards and deprive them of a secret ballot election,” Osborne said, speaking to the Senate Commerce & Tourism Committee. He argued that neutrality agreements “are actually more of a one-sided mechanism, not neutral.”
Templin, meanwhile, said the bill, on its face, “eliminates choice.”
“It literally says, ‘Hey, if you’re going to get any state money, you can’t do this, even though you might think it’s best for your business and best for your workers and best for you.”
Senate Bill 1236, nonetheless, was advanced by the Senate Commerce & Tourism Committee Wednesday in a 6-3 vote along party lines Wednesday. House Bill 1387 was similarly advanced by a House committee in a 11-4 vote, with Republicans in favor and Democrats in opposition.
A separate bill (HB 995) that would completely scrap public employees’ ability to unionize through a card check or voluntary recognition under state law is similarly advancing in the Florida House. The Senate version of that bill (SB 1296) was temporarily postponed this week and hasn’t been rescheduled for a hearing.
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