Florida lawmakers are advancing Senate Bill 1236 and House Bill 1387 during the 2026 legislative session. The bills would condition eligibility for certain state economic development incentives on an employer’s commitment that union representation decisions occur through a secret-ballot election conducted by the National Labor Relations Board, rather than through card-check or other forms of voluntary recognition without an election.
Predictably, critics have labeled the proposal anti-union. That framing misses the larger point. From a management-side perspective, these bills sit squarely within the long-running labor law reform debate over how employee choice should be exercised and protected, not whether employees should have the right to organize.
Under the National Labor Relations Act, secret-ballot elections conducted by the NLRB have been the preferred method for determining union representation. The premise here is simple. When the vote is conducted on a secret ballot, employees can make their choice without facing peer pressure or retaliation.
Florida’s SB 1236 and HB 1387 do not ban organizing, restrict union access, or rewrite federal labor law. What they do is draw a line around how representation decisions are expected to occur when taxpayer-funded incentives are involved. The state is not weighing in on outcomes. It expresses a preference for the process, specifically the federally supervised election process that has governed representation questions for decades.
Florida is not acting in isolation. Similar bills were introduced and passed in other states, including Georgia and Alabama.
In Georgia, lawmakers enacted Senate Bill 362 in 2024. The law conditions eligibility for certain state economic development incentives on union recognition being established through a secret-ballot election rather than card-check recognition.
Alabama followed with Act 2024-340, enacted through Senate Bill 231, which takes the same general approach as Georgia and Florida.
These measures are part of a larger policy discussion about labor law reform playing out at the federal and state levels. By passing this type of legislation, states are signaling that if labor unions want to organize workers, they should do so through secret-ballot elections, not through indirect pressure campaigns that lead to neutrality agreements that bypass the election process.
From a management perspective, the appeal is obvious. Secret ballot elections are uniform, federally supervised, and reliable. They provide a well-established process that reduces uncertainty and avoids the risk of prolonged corporate campaigns intended to force the employer to agree to a union voluntarily. They provide both parties with a clear and defensible outcome. They also protect the employees’ right to make their own choices about union representation.
Advocating for secret ballots is not about opposing unions. It is about ensuring that one of the most consequential decisions in the workplace is made through a process that employees understand, trust, and can participate in without pressure.
