Florida's $15 Minimum Wage (Amendment 2, 2020)
Voters wrote a $15 wage into the state constitution. The predicted job apocalypse didn't arrive - but a booming Florida makes the experiment hard to read.
B · 17/24
1 · The idealist case (in its proponents' own framing)
Proponents argued that a phased, constitutionally-fixed wage floor would lift incomes for low-paid Floridians without leaving the increase to a legislature unlikely to act. Amendment 2 passed in November 2020 with the required 60.8% supermajority, raising the minimum to $10 on September 30, 2021, then $1 each year to $15 on September 30, 2026. Supporters pointed to a large body of modern minimum-wage research finding little measurable employment loss from moderate increases.
2 · The realist counter-case
Opponents - the Florida Restaurant and Lodging Association, the state Chamber, and economists David Macpherson and William Even - projected real harm: estimates ranged from about 158,000 jobs lost (Macpherson/Even, using CBO-style methods) to far higher figures, plus accelerated automation and roughly $7.3 billion in added business costs by 2026. The realist worry is concentrated harm: the least-skilled and rural workers bear the risk even if statewide aggregates look fine.
3 · Predicted vs. measured — with caveats
Predicted: six-figure job losses and small-business closures. Measured: Florida's unemployment stayed at or below national rates through 2021-2025 and the state kept adding jobs, including in leisure and hospitality, as the floor rose to $14 by September 2025. Caveats - and they are large: Florida's pandemic-era population boom and in-migration supercharged labor demand, so the absence of visible job loss cannot be cleanly credited to the wage policy; there is no rigorous Florida-specific causal study isolating Amendment 2's effect, and the final $15 step lands in late 2026. The catastrophe didn't show, but the clean counterfactual is missing.
4 · Liberty check
A minimum wage trades one freedom for another: it constrains the liberty of an employer and a worker to agree on a sub-$15 wage, in order to strengthen the bargaining floor under low-paid labor. Reasonable people weigh those differently. Notably, Florida chose the most democratically legitimate route - a 60% constitutional supermajority - rather than an agency mandate, which answers the process objection even if the economic one stays open.
5 · The real tradeoff
The real tradeoff: the dire predictions failed to materialize, which is itself informative, but Florida is the hardest possible place to learn from because its economy was on fire for unrelated reasons. The wage floor likely helped many low-paid workers with modest disemployment; whether the last dollar to $15 changes that calculus is the live question. Honest verdict: a defensible policy whose success here is real but over-determined.
Allies & Playbook
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Florida Amendment 2 (2020)
Worked: Locked a phased wage floor into the constitution by supermajority; predicted mass job losses did not appear.
Watch: Florida's booming economy confounds any causal read; no clean state-specific study; final $15 step lands late 2026.
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