It’s a growing who’s who of Corporate Florida: office supplier Office Depot, cruise line Carnival Corporation, family restaurant chain Darden, Jacksonville-based health insurer Florida Blue, pro baskeball franchise Miami Heat, electric utility NextEra Energy, Clearwater-based Tech Data, banking giant Wells Fargo and grocer Winn Dixie — some of the 23 major employers throwing their collective weight behind a would-be law to protect LGBT workers across the state.
This coalition, formally known as Florida Businesses for a Competitive Workforce (which is different from its little sister of smaller firms, Florida Competes), is currently building political momentum for enacting the Competitive Workforce Act, a bill reintroduced in the legislature last December by Rep. Holly Raschein, R-Florida Keys, and Sen. Joe Abruzzo, D-Wellington.
The bill would address a hole in Florida law by banning workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identification. Currently, 84 percent of the largest U.S. companies have adopted policies that include these protections, while 21 states, 250 U.S. cities and 160 localities in Florida have implemented similar laws.
As a result, more than 60 percent of all Floridians now live under a local human rights ordinance, said Stratton Pollitzer, deputy director of Equality Florida, explaining that many Florida lawmakers now represent these same areas. Pollitzer said 10 Republicans co-sponsored the House bill last year. He expects 12-15 Republicans to join this time around.
“Florida has become a leader, providing a model for the region and the entire country,” said Pollitizer, explaining that Equality Means Business and Another Business For Equality are now trademarked by Louisiana, Virginia and North Carolina. “Florida has achieved the most progress in passing a statewide law despite the legislature being firmly in the hands of the Republican Party.”
But aside from this emphasis on business, what about big labor? Why don’t we hear about grassroots support from the Service Employees International Union or Pride At Work, a constituency group of the 900,000-member AFL-CIO?
“Constituency groups like Pride At Work have been actively supporting legislation like this for more than 10 years,” said Rich Templin, legislative director of the Florida AFL-CIO. “And although some (Pride At Work) chapters are more active in some states than others, we’re working to reinvigorate the dormant Florida organization by improving recruitment and resources.”
Templin admitted that the untrumpeted support coming from organized labor groups has a lot to do with the composition of the Florida legislature, where pro-business Republicans enjoy not only one of their own in the governor’s mansion but solid majorities in both chambers.
“In the Tallahassee bubble, it’s far more compelling to hear from business leaders than from labor leaders,” Templin said. “Our biggest contribution continues to be on the ground. Although the words of business leaders carry a lot more weight than the words of workers, we applaud these businesses for jumping aboard. It’s the right thing to do.”
As a right-to-work state, the deck is already stacked against the labor movement in Florida. Right-to-work laws exist to suppress union membership and artificially deflate their numbers, so any effort to protect LGBT worker rights should not be divorced from the greater context of promoting labor rights in general.
Look no further than what happened in another right-to-work state, Kansas, where Gov. Sam Brownback, in an effort to avoid creating more ‘protected classes’, rescinded a 2007 executive order by former Gov. Kathleen Sebelius that protected the rights of LGBT state workers. Kansas is now back in the mix with more than 30 states where LGBT employment discrimination is legal.
And because the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) has stalled in Congress due to religious arguments, there is an obvious need for the kind of coalition-building we see in Florida.
But if we’re going to see real progress in the workplace, be it private or public, we need to make sure that the benefits received by one group flow to everybody, which is how right-to-work laws work anyway. When a company union negotiates a raise, every worker at that company gets a boost in pay. All workers thus become part of something larger, where the principles and goals of a movement are embodied in what President Obama calls middle-class economics.
It’s high time that years of support from organized labor for human rights in the workplace are celebrated along with each corporate stakeholder and not taken for granted as we focus on LGBT worker rights, whether or not the term “competitiveness” is often used to maintain the dichotomy of management versus labor.
It takes two to tango.
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