We’re Miami-Dade contractors. Here’s why Florida shouldn’t force us to cut wages | Opinion
As a group of small and medium business owners, we are concerned about the Florida Legislature’s latest attempt to preempt living wage laws and procurement standards. Collectively, we employ over 1,000 security guards, who carry out the essential and dangerous work of keeping our communities safe.
House Bill 705 and House Bill 433, both introduced this legislative session, would eliminate minimum wage standards set by local governments such as Miami-Dade County for contractors offering services like security, cleaning and construction.
For responsible contractors like us, who have built our businesses on the caliber of our product, this poses an existential threat.
In the absence of a living wage law, public contracting bids are likely to become a race to the bottom, where contractors that formerly competed on work quality compete over cost alone.
This is likely to discourage healthy competition in markets across Florida, while squandering tax dollars on low-quality public services that make our communities less safe.
Hurting competition
Florida localities have had living wage laws since the early 2000s. These laws set a compensation floor that ensures contractors can offer wages to attract and retain dependable and experienced workers without being underbid. This has meant a win for businesses, workers and the public alike, ensuring healthy staffing levels for contractors, family-sustaining wages for their employees and quality services for the people of Florida.
House Bill 433 would preempt not only local worker heat protection requirements, as originally proposed, but would also bar local governments from even considering compensation standards in evaluating bids from contractors. The proposed changes would make it nearly impossible to offer the wages and benefits necessary to maintain basic staffing levels, let alone a quality workforce.
If HB 433 becomes law, our contracted security officers in Miami-Dade County could see their hourly compensation fall from the current floor of $16.51 in wages, plus $3.83 in health benefits, to the state minimum wage of $12 with no benefits — a decrease of over 40% in total compensation.
Bad for recruiting
We’ve been in this business long enough to know that you can’t find a quality security worker willing to work for $12 an hour, especially with Miami’s soaring cost of living.
In November 2023, Miami-Dade County hit its lowest unemployment rate on record. Finding an experienced worker willing to take this pay cut will challenging, if not impossible. This will hurt the quality of services that Floridians rely on.
Preemption of living wage ordinances is also likely to increase costs for employers. If contractors are unable to recruit new workers, existing workers may need to work more, increasing overtime costs; many may choose to leave.
Research on the impact of living wages in California found they increased productivity and work quality while decreasing the costs associated with turnover and absenteeism. As procurement lobbyist Luis Gazitua wrote in an op-ed for the Miami Herald last year, “when [firms] can afford to hire and retain qualified employees by offering living wages, their bids are higher quality, leverage more technology and innovation, and are more likely to complete projects on time and within budget.”
A strength of living wage laws is that they allow localities the freedom to set job standards that are right for their own labor markets. Eliminating them would be a serious overstep of state government, interfering in local communities’ rights to make decisions for themselves and imposing a one-size-fits all model on diverse economies across Florida.
For the health of hard-working families and our economies, it is critical that we see these bills for the anti-business measures that they are.
William A. Lopez is founder and CEO of Vista Security Services International. Joe Diaz is president and CEO of Delta Five Security. Edward A. Heflin is president of Centurion Security Group.
