For workers, Florida is mediocre

Florida boosters like to tout the state’s fame as an important place to do enterprise. However in accordance with Oxfam, it isn’t an important place to work for lots of people.

Driving the information: Florida ranked twenty ninth among the many 50 states plus D.C. and Puerto Rico on the anti-poverty nonprofit’s newest annual examine of the “Finest and Worst States to Work in America.”

• Oregon topped the record, adopted by its West Coast neighbors California and Washington state.

Particulars: Florida loses factors for its $10 hourly minimal wage, which is about one-quarter of the $37.25 per hour that Oxfam says is required to help a household of 4.

• Florida’s minimal wage does prolong to farmworkers, however native municipalities cannot set the minimal wage above the state’s.

Sure, however: Florida voters authorized a mandate to make the minimal wage $15 by 2026 — so it’ll improve by a greenback on Sept. 30 yearly till then.

The nonprofit additionally dinged Florida for its weak office protections. Whereas the state mandates equal pay throughout gender and race and offers sexual harassment safety in state regulation, per Oxfam, Florida doesn’t:

• Accommodate pregnant staff.
• Provide protections for office breast-feeding.
• Present some type of paid household or sick go away.
• Prolong employee protections to home staff.
• Or set up a bunch of different office security and equity requirements.

The large image: Southeast states like Florida, the place lawmakers have handed employer-friendly “proper to work” legal guidelines that make labor-organizing tough, dominated the underside of the “finest locations to work” record.

• Virginia leads the Southeast in employee protections and compensation.
• Florida’s closest comparability on the labor index is Arkansas.