The kids aren’t looking too happy. Credit: The Florida Channel

Florida’s minimum wage is one of the highest in the U.S. South. The state minimum wage currently sits at $13 an hour for non-tipped workers, and will rise to $14 later this year. That’s because of a constitutional amendment Florida voters approved in 2020 to gradually raise the state minimum wage to $15 an hour by Sept. 30, 2026.

But some state legislators in the Florida Legislature — who forced voters to approve a higher minimum wage, because they wouldn’t enact one themselves — think this base wage is too burdensome for some employers. That is, employers who want to pay workers less, but don’t want to break the law.

With a row of young people sitting quietly behind him during a committee hearing Monday, Florida Sen. Jonathan Martin, R-Fort Meyers, defended a new proposal of his (SB 676) that would create carve-outs from Florida’s minimum wage for interns, apprentices, “pre-apprentices” and other work-study program employees.

The proposal itself doesn’t include specific age limits for which workers employers can pay less than the bare minimum. But Martin claimed, in explaining his bill, that the goal is to allow young, unskilled workers to trade away their right to a minimum wage in order to gain job experience and skills.

“We’re not talking about somebody who has to have a livable wage to survive,” Martin claimed. “We’re closing out opportunity for an entire generation to build skills and develop opportunities in the workforce that we all had when we were growing up.”

“If the young people who want the skills, want to work … I want to make sure that the employers can afford to bring them on,” he added.

“If the young people who want the skills, want to work … I want to make sure that the employers can afford to bring them on”

The bill introduced by Martin — and Florida Rep. Ryan Chamberlin, R-Belleview, in the Florida House (HB 541) — doesn’t explicitly say employers can pay interns and apprentices less than minimum wage. But it does offer the opportunity for a worker to “opt out” of being paid minimum wage.

Under the proposal, an apprentice or intern could “[check] a box on an application form to opt out of the minimum wage requirements” or “[provide] the employer with a written acknowledgment signed by the employee that the employee is opting out of the minimum wage requirements.”

An amendment made to the bill by Martin on Monday would require workers under 18 to get a parent or guardian to sign off on the waiver. It would also require that a worker “knowingly and voluntarily” agree to being paid a “lesser amount.”

Opponents of the bill, including State Sen. Carlos Guillermo Smith, D-Orlando, said the bill would allow employers to exploit workers of all ages, including but not limited to teenagers in the workforce. “We have a constitutional minimum wage in Florida: It’s $13 an hour. And this law, this proposal, is an attempt to circumvent it,” Smith argued. “It’s an attempt to exploit workers of all ages.”

Jackson Oberlink, a lobbyist for Florida Rising — a progressive advocacy group — also pointed out that because there aren’t specific definitions for who counts as an “intern” under law, unlike apprentices, employers could leverage that ambiguity to their advantage.

“A fast food worker, a grocery store cashier or a construction apprentice could suddenly find themselves reclassified as an intern and making far less than the legal minimum wage,” said Oberlink. “There’s nothing in this bill to stop employers from using that loophole to slash wages.”

The bill could also be unconstitutional. A Senate staff analysis of the proposal notes that, under existing case law, even “if an employee signs a waiver stating that they opt out of minimum wage requirements, the employer is still bound by the minimum wage requirements of the state Constitution.”

Martin, however, believes that if this bill did pass, and someone sued over it, the conservative majority of the Florida Supreme Court would have his back. “I’m very confident that this is something that the Florida Supreme Court would side with us on,” he declared.

Unlike state law, any changes to Florida’s state constitution must be first approved by voters. “The language of the constitutional mandate is clear that employers
must pay the established, hourly minimum wage to employees,” the staff analysis reads. “There is no exception or exemption from the minimum wage specified in the state constitution, other than those incorporated from the [Fair Labor Standards Act].”

Where did it come from?

Florida’s business lobby has been fighting Florida’s minimum wage requirements for decades — first, by lobbying against a constitutional amendment in 2004 that first established Florida’s minimum wage, separate from the federal minimum wage (which currently languishes at just $7.25 an hour).

More recently, Major League Baseball successfully lobbied lawmakers in 2023 to carve out minor league players from Florida’s minimum wage requirements. The following year, business groups such as the Chamber of Commerce and the catch-all Associated Industries of Florida convinced Florida’s GOP lawmakers to approve a bill (HB 433) that, effective October 2026, will prohibit cities and counties from requiring their government contractors to pay their employees anything above the state minimum.

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Martin maintained, however, that the idea for the bill didn’t come from a think tank, or from model legislation pushed by conservative “bill mills” like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Instead, he said it came out of an organic conversation with Chamberlin, the House bill sponsor.

“Because the minimum wage was so high, I saw a lot of young, younger students — teenagers — missing out opportunities that we had when we were growing up, when the minimum wage was much lower, where we could hone our skills, build a résumé and develop job skills that would be beneficial through the rest of our career,” he said.

A spokesperson for the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive independent think tank that researches economic trends and policies, said their experts were not aware of similar bills that had recently been introduced elsewhere in the U.S.

The National Federation of Independent Business has registered to lobby on the bill, according to disclosure records. The Florida NAACP, Florida Alliance for Retired Americans, Florida AFL-CIO and Florida National Organization for Women (NOW) are opposed.

Under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act, employers are legally allowed to pay workers under 20 years old a subminimum wage for the first 90 days of their employment. Others, including incarcerated workers, certain workers with disabilities, and tipped workers, are also legally allowed to be paid subminimum wages.

‘Our apprentices have a hard enough time as it is’

Sean Donnelly, director of two apprenticeship programs run by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 606 in Orlando, told Orlando Weekly he isn’t entirely sure Martin and Chamberlin’s proposal would affect their program — since the union negotiates wages for apprentices directly with employers and contractors.

But the idea still doesn’t sit well with him. “One hundred percent, I am worried about it affecting our own programs.”

Apprenticeship programs can be union — where a local labor union will negotiate competitive pay for apprentices, and help them find work after — or non-union. Some of the non-union programs may, for instance, be sponsored by an employer, a contractor, or a trade group like the Associated Builders and Contractors, a group that has openly opposed minimum wage mandates and lobbied last year to allow teenagers to legally work atop roofs.

The IBEW’s three-year electrician apprenticeship program in Orlando offers starting wages of $17.15 an hour for their inside wireman route — above minimum wage — and $21 an hour for a program at Walt Disney World.

The programs are tuition-free, and wages rise each year of the program. By the program’s end, apprentices in the inside wireman program earn $27.12 an hour, and those in the Disney World program earn $24 an hour.

Donnelly, himself a graduate of an IBEW program, said the program is perfect for people who maybe can’t afford or don’t want to go to college, but who want to build a career that offers a living wage.

All apprentices are paid the same, regardless of race or ethnicity or gender. All you need is a high school diploma or GED. The average age of their apprentices is young people in their early to mid-20s. Their oldest graduate, a couple of years ago, was 69 years old.

Donnelly notes that even with their current wage scale, apprentices in Florida are struggling to make ends meet. “Our apprentices have a hard enough time as it is, working in Central Florida,” he admitted. “A very difficult time.”

More ‘freedom’ for working Floridians

Taking into account basic expenses such as housing, groceries and transportation, MIT’s living wage calculator estimates that a childless single adult in Florida must bring in $23.41 per hour working full-time (annual earnings of $48,692) in order to just live comfortably. If you have one child, that rises to $38.72 an hour, or $41.50 an hour in a two-adult household with two children where just one adult is working.

Martin, who admitted he had to turn down an unpaid internship in college himself because he couldn’t afford it, claimed his minimum wage proposal will give individual workers more “freedom” and “opportunities.”

“This gives an individual the freedom to show up at an employer’s place of business and say, ‘Hey, I’m willing to sweep floors and learn the job. I’m willing to be a hand while you’re working on engines, and hold a flashlight for you. I’m willing to learn your business in exchange for experience and skills,’ that they could then transfer into the workplace without having to pay to go to college,” said Martin.

Sen. Tom Leek, chair of the Senate Commerce & Tourism committee that heard the bill Monday, added that internships and apprenticeship programs are just “temporary.”

“You’re not committing yourself to a life of a lower wage, but what you are doing is allowing that person to make the decision on their own, that they would like to have a marketable skill more than they’d like to have 15 bucks an hour,” he said. “And that’s a fair trade.”

The Senate Commerce & Tourism Committee voted 5-3 along party lines to advance the bill forward, with Democratic senators Tracie Davis, Smith, and Kristen Arrington voting against and Sen. Clay Yarborough absent. Republican Sen. Joe Gruters voted in favor of advancing it forward, but admitted he had “reservations.”

The House version of the bill will be heard by the House Industries and Professional Activities Subcommittee at 1 p.m. on Wednesday (you can watch that live here).

Both proposals have to clear three committees and be approved by a majority in the House and Senate chambers in order to pass. Then, the bill would head to Gov. Ron DeSantis for his final approval.

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This article appears in Mar 19-25, 2025.

General news reporter for Orlando Weekly, with a focus on state and local government and workers' rights. You can find her bylines in Creative Loafing Tampa Bay, In These Times, and Facing South.