Florida’s minimum wage is about to hit $15 — and that didn’t come by chance, or the political will of politicians, but by the tenacity and determination of Floridians themselves.
A $15 minimum wage in 2020 got more votes in Florida than either Donald Trump or Joe Biden, receiving bipartisan support from voters across party lines.
More than six million Floridians of all political stripes that year voted for Amendment 2, a ballot measure to gradually increase the state’s minimum wage. Its passage made Florida the first state in the U.S. South — a region marred by anti-worker policies and economic insecurity — to get on track towards a $15 wage floor.
“People really, really cared and responded to the minimum wage increase, and did not particularly care about anything else,” recalled Sam Ronen, a community organizer from Tampa.
Ronen helped organize for Amendment 2’s passage during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as other top-of-ticket priorities for Democrats, as an organizer for the progressive advocacy group For Our Future.
Kelly Benjamin, another longtime community activist who gained his footing during Occupy Wall Street protests, explained how working-class Floridians built the $15 minimum wage campaign from the ground up, years before Amendment 2 even secured a spot on the ballot.
“It was really less focused on a legislative fight and more about the day-to-day struggle of working-class people,” said Benjamin, who today works in the labor movement advocating for higher education workers.
“You’re building a movement with folks who found their voice and had been angry, frustrated about the reality of the economy that we’re living in,” he recalled. “And then when people found an opportunity to vent that, or found an opportunity to organize and focus and bring real attention and change to these issues, it caught like wildfire. And that’s why it kind of spread as it did.”
Benjamin organized support for a $15 minimum wage in Florida alongside a coalition of faith leaders, fast-food workers living paycheck to paycheck, immigrant rights advocates, and labor unions.
“Besides parenthood,” said Benjamin, with a chuckle, “it was one of the most transformative experiences of my life.”
Something to vote for
President Donald Trump, who won Florida in 2020, still trailed the $15 minimum wage measure in popularity in Florida by roughly 700,000 votes that year, according to state elections data.
Joe Biden, who’d pledged to raise the federal minimum wage to $15, if elected, received more than one million less votes from Floridians, compared to Amendment 2. His administration didn’t end up following through, once in office.
“If I remember correctly, there weren’t a ton of inspiring things on that ballot,” said Stephanie Porta, a longtime community organizer from Orlando, reflecting on the 2020 election. “And raising the minimum wage to $15 was something that could inspire people to turn out to vote.”
Porta helped organize for the $15 minimum wage in 2020 through Organize Florida, a social and economic justice advocacy group that merged in 2021 with New Majority Florida to form what is today Florida Rising.
Porta today lives in West Virginia and works for the anti-Trump coalition Battleground Alliance. She attributes some of the success of Amendment 2 to an earlier, successful effort by Floridians to raise the minimum wage through the ballot box in 2004.
“We really started to think about ballot initiatives as a way not just to build our power, but to get to the working-class needs that are forever ignored.”
Stephanie Porta
That 2004 ballot measure, establishing the first state minimum wage in Florida — higher than the federal minimum wage at the time — passed with 71 percent support.
“That’s when we really started to think about ballot initiatives as a way not just to build our power,” Porta recalled. “But to get to the working class needs that are forever ignored — as long as our state is controlled by Republicans or the fancy Democrats that don’t believe in poor people.”
The fight for 15
Six years after the Amendment 2’s passage in Florida, the final phase-in of the measure — which gradually raised the state minimum wage $1 each year — will finally be realized this week.
Effective Sept. 30, 2026, Florida’s minimum wage will be $15 an hour for nontipped workers, up from $8.56 an hour in 2020.
Workers who earn tips will need to be paid at least $11.98 an hour, effective Sept. 30 — that’s more than double what it was six years ago, before Florida voters took their dissatisfaction with their paychecks to the polls.
“There are families that are living on that wage, and I hope people celebrate that,” said Florida AFL-CIO political director Rich Templin.
He pointed out that the majority of workers earning minimum wage in the U.S. aren’t actually teenagers, according to federal data, but adults aged 25 and older. In Florida, more than half of the state’s minimum wage workforce is aged 25 and older. About 11 percent are older than 55.
“For the longest time, the misinformation has been put out there that minimum wage only affects, you know, high school kids getting their first job,” said Templin, who’s worked in the worker policy space for decades as an advocate for organized labor. “That’s just not accurate.”
The Florida AFL-CIO, a federation of hundreds of local labor unions in Florida, backed the $15 minimum wage amendment in 2020.
But even Templin agrees that, in the current economic landscape, where average wage growth is failing to keep pace with rising worker productivity, the minimum wage should be closer to $20 or $25.
“But I also hope they [the public] realize it wouldn’t even be $15 an hour if it wasn’t for organizing and the people taking a stand,” he said. “And I think maybe it’s time for them to do that again and raise that wage even higher.”
Dr. Alexis Tsoukalas, a labor policy analyst for the Florida Policy Institute, pointed to data showing that a $15 minimum wage in Florida still isn’t enough to make ends meet in any county.
“Fifteen dollars, even, is not enough for a full-time worker at that rate to afford basic expenses — you know, just housing, transportation, and groceries alone for most people in any county in Florida, even if they don’t have kids,” she told the Weekly.
A real living wage in Florida – or, a wage that allows for someone to comfortably afford basic living expenses — ranges from about $24 for a single, childless adult, up to nearly $40 for a single adult with two kids, or $26.85 for two working adults with two kids, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s living wage calculator.
Ronen, the organizer from Tampa, believes that regardless of whether you’re a low-income earner or somewhere in the middle — between Florida’s flightiest billionaires — most everyone’s on the struggle bus right now.
“I think more and more and more, if you’re not in a small club of like 10 people in the state of Florida, you’re not having a good time,” he said. “Whether you live in a mansion or on the streets, we’re all kind of in the same boat to varying effect.”
Protecting the gains
At least 20 other states, plus Washington D.C., also now have a minimum wage of $15 or higher, or are on a path towards $15. According to Business for a Fair Minimum Wage, Florida is joining six other states — Arizona, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Missouri and Nebraska — in reaching a minimum wage of at least $15 in 2026.
Nationally, U.S. Congress hasn’t raised the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour since 2009, despite repeated efforts by Democrats over the years.
The federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour hasn’t gone up in almost 20 years.
In Florida, a higher minimum wage couldn’t get past the state legislature either — which is why workers decided to take the issue to the polls.
Notably, neither major political party in Florida even endorsed the $15 minimum wage measure in 2020. The Miami-Dade Democratic Party endorsed the measure, but the statewide Florida Democratic Party did not.
“I see Democrats in Florida harping, constantly, the word ‘affordability,’ but I don’t really know what that means to them,” said Ronen, who doesn’t feel the party has significantly shifted on its “Diet Republican” messaging since, despite changes in party leadership.
Ronen is a co-founder of the Progressive Jewish Coalition and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, although he spoke to Orlando Weekly solely in a personal capacity for this story. He’s also currently working on the campaign of Ashley Herrmann, a democratic socialist endorsed by DSA who is running as a Democrat to flip a Florida House seat in the Tampa area.
A red flag
Florida Republicans, on the other hand, have generally held tight to their relationships with the business community, which poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into a campaign in 2020 to defeat the $15 minimum wage measure.
“Ballot Amendment 2 is a job killer,” said Florida Restaurant and Lodging Association president Carol Dover, at the time. “It will hurt businesses, and it will destroy Florida’s economy.”
After Amendment 2 passed, the business community’s Republican allies stood up to help.
In 2021, the year after Amendment 2 passed, then-Sen. Jeff Brandes, R-St. Petersburg, introduced a bill to specifically carve out young workers and workers with felony convictions from Florida’s minimum wage requirements, arguing it would help incentivize employers to hire them.
It didn’t pass.
In more recent years, the GOP-controlled Florida legislature did successfully pass legislation to weaken the state’s child labor protections and has ignored efforts to strengthen the mechanism for enforcing the rising state minimum wage.
Republicans also tried (unsuccessfully) this year and last to allow employers to pay certain workers — specifically interns, workers in pre-apprenticeship programs and other “work-study” programs — less than minimum wage as well.
“This is all pointing to, essentially, a greedy marketplace,” said Templin. “And policymakers here in Florida need to reorient their vision in realizing that that there’s got to be there’s got to be some guardrails.”
As worker productivity and prices have increased, so too have the profits of major corporations. “If you look at real profits of corporate America, they did not diminish as prices went up,” said Templin. “They did not stay the same as prices went up. Profits increased.”
Florida has long been considered a business-friendly state, where business interests can lobby state leaders for special tax breaks, the right to raise rents at will, and where some of Florida’s wealthiest residents pay a lesser share of their wealth on taxes than Florida’s lowest-income earners due to the state’s regressive tax system.
“The class war has always been very real here,” said Benjamin. “This is a state that’s in flux, rapidly changing, and I think that we have real opportunities to bring about sustainable change if people organize.”
What drove the campaign’s success
Many at the time of Amendment 2’s passage gave kudos to Orlando attorney John Morgan, founder of law firm Morgan & Morgan, for the measure’s success — pointing to the fact that Morgan helped bankroll the campaign.
But organizers who worked on the campaign told the Weekly they attribute its success not to Orlando’s most high-profile billionaire attorney, but to hard-working, low-wage workers themselves and the labor union SEIU that built the Fight for $15 and a Union movement years beforehand.
“Organizing works,” said Porta, simply. “We really do have power in numbers, and that there are more of us than them.”
“Honestly, and maybe this seems corny … I mean, I think the people won it for themselves,” Ronen added.
One of the most surprising details of the $15 minimum wage victory in Florida wasn’t just that it passed — just barely surpassing the 60 percent threshold needed in Florida.
It also, evidently, got bipartisan support from voters. But organizers who talked to voters on the ground weren’t surprised by this, come Election Day.
Richie Floyd, a former teacher and DSA member from St. Petersburg who volunteered on the campaign, recalled encountering Trump voters in 2020 through textbanking who were just as enthusiastic to vote for a higher minimum wage as Trump’s vision to “Make America Great Again.”
“They were like, I can vote for that? And we were like, yeah,” Floyd told Orlando Weekly in an interview. “And they were like, OK cool, yeah, I support it. So, it was pretty obvious that we were getting support from all over and not just, like, from one political party.”
Floyd, 35, later ran for St. Petersburg City Council in 2021 as an open democratic socialist — and won. He retained his seat this year for a second term by default since no one filed paperwork to challenge him.
“Florida is fundamentally a working-class state with really high income inequality,” Floyd argued. A lot of the state’s economy relies on hospitality and tourism, he added — most of which tend to generate lower-wage jobs.
Both Benjamin and Floyd compared the enthusiasm for Amendment 2 to the resonance of Angie Nixon, a Jacksonville progressive who scored an upset victory in the Democratic U.S. Senate primary this summer against moderate candidate Alex Vindman. Nixon is running to unseat Republican U.S. Sen. Ashley Moody this fall.
“Floridians are desperate for a political outlet that will actually change their material conditions for the better, and specifically working class Floridians,” said Floyd. “We have not been given that opportunity very often in the course of the state’s history, but you can see that when we do get given that opportunity, we quite often pounce on it.”
