Florida-based worker justice and reproductive justice activists gathered in Orlando to discuss how their movements can, do, and should overlap in October 2024. This came after Florida enacted a six-week abortion ban in May 2024. One month after the meeting, a constitutional amendment that would have prohibited government interference with abortion rights received a majority of votes—and still failed because of a 60 percent supermajority requirement. 18 months later, Florida's draconian six-week abortion ban remains in place, while 2026 is marred by aggressive union-busting legislation and ICE raids targeting undocumented workers (and Latino U.S. citizens) throughout the state. State action against pregnant and working-class people is growing, and joint organizing is the only way forward.
"Abortion access is worker justice," said Clarke Wheeler, a senior policy analyst at the National Women's Law Centre and advocate for the AbortionUnitesUs campaign, a programme working with labour organizations in Florida to increase links between workers' rights, trade union movements, and reproductive rights activism.
"From access to health care and paid sick leave, to privacy rights and non-discrimination protections, the right to control what happens to your body is deeply connected to the right to control your labor," Wheeler said.
Following Dobbs, Florida first enacted a 15-week abortion ban, with neighboring states in the Southeast enacting trigger bans that caused near-total abortions throughout the region. Florida was thus, at one point, where Southeastern pregnant people travelled to for an abortion. But since the 2024 six-week abortion ban, Florida has joined its neighbours in forcing residents to travel out of state. In other words, two years on, Florida is now a "surge state." Since 2024, abortion funds in Florida (and there are only six) spending just under 7.2 million dollars in funding abortion-related costs, often for non-medical expenses like flights or lodging.
Abolition As the Only Reproductive Justice: A Conversation with Zoe Bambara
Our anchoring question is this: Can you be an accomplice to Reproductive Justice while wielding the power to incarcerate, separate families, and deny medical care—as long as you agree to look the other way on one specific charge?
Lana'e Hernandez, a caseworker at the Florida Access Network (FAN), has seen clients spend up to $14,000 to access abortion, largely for more complicated cases like these out-of-state situations. In North Carolina, the closest state to Florida without a near-total abortion ban, a 72-hour-long waiting period is mandatory. "They want you to 'sit and think about your choices,'" Hernandez explained. This also means three extra days of leave and lodging expenses. The increasingly popular alternative is Virginia, which doesn't have any waiting period. With rising fuel prices, a round-trip flight from Tallahassee to Richmond is about $300.
The uncomfortable truth, however, is that these abortion funds exist where the state and the workplace have failed. "Floridian union workers overwhelmingly support access to abortion and want to see their unions fighting for those rights," Wheeler said. Most insurance offerings are unable to provide coverage for abortions, except for private, employee-sponsored plans. Even so, most plans do not provide any support for abortion-related costs—and only 40 percent of Florida workers even have employer-provided insurance.
"We work closely with abortion funds in the state and since the implementation of Florida's near-total abortion ban, they have been helping families and workers navigate the logistical barriers the ban imposes, from cost of transportation and child or elder care, to taking time off work and getting accommodations out of town," said Cheyenne Drews of Progress Florida, a grassroots organization working at the intersection of worker and abortion rights. "Under Florida's worsening affordability crisis, cutting off access to care or creating additional financial barriers to accessing it inherently hurts working people and their families."
In a climate where fetal personhood language is increasingly normalized, FAN, Progress Florida, and the National Women's Law Centre emphasize that reproductive justice for workers goes far beyond abortion—but can't be fortified without abortion rights. For the third year in a row, Progress Florida has organized against the Civil Liability Bill (its full name is "Civil Liability for the Wrongful Death of an Unborn Child") and the conditions that made it possible. The bill and the lawmakers behind it hope to ultimately establish legal personhood at conception, giving embryos legal rights. This would open doors for physicians and medical workers to be targeted for providing things like In vitro fertilization (IVF) or chemotherapy that may harm a pregnancy, for insurers to skyrocket prices for malpractice and liability insurance, and for employment discrimination against women in their 20s and 30s, if employers fear that a workplace injury or incident could harm a pregnancy.
"If workplaces are afraid of being sued or that their malpractice insurance will skyrocket, workers have fears of losing their rights and ability to work," Cheyenne said. The bill, and ones like it, may very well be introduced for a fourth time next spring. For organizations like Progress Florida and trade unions across the state, the bill is one of many in a bombardment of anti-choice, anti-worker legislation.
The AbortionUnitesUs campaign, through its collaboration, has made a toolkit for labour organizers and workers to advocate for their reproductive rights. It's split into two primary aims: the first is advocating for employers to compensate for where the state has failed and provide workers with financial and professional support through their abortion experience, and the second is for trade unions to advocate at the legislative level for reproductive freedoms. "We're proud to have partnered with frontline organizations that are educating and mobilizing their communities at the intersection of reproductive freedoms and workers' rights. This work plays a pivotal role in resisting anti-democratic forces and ultimately securing reproductive and worker justice in Florida and across the country," said Wheeler.
Since collaborating with labour organizations during the Amendment 4 campaign, FAN has incorporated labour and worker organizing into its advocacy goals. "We have begun working with labour organizations to help bridge the gap and not just abortion rights," said Hernandez. "It's not just abortion—it's reproductive health in general." Hernandez's colleague, for instance, is currently on a payment plan for a five-figure medical bill from their first pregnancy, while on Medicaid. "The working class, we're working part-time jobs, we don't have health insurance, we don't have access to saying 'Hey, I need to leave for a few days,' because that leads to retaliation,'" Jamie Clinton, Community Engagement Manager for FAN, explained.
Legally, retaliation against workers because of anti-abortion stigma isn't legal. "Discrimination on the basis of having an abortion is protected under federal law, at least for those companies that are covered by Title VII. Title VII protects against sex discrimination. The Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA) makes clear that sex discrimination includes discrimination based on pregnancy, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) has interpreted the PDA to include discrimination based on ending a pregnancy," explained Caroline Mala Corbin, Professor of Law at the University of Miami. Corbin is an expert in constitutional law, with an interest in reproductive rights. "I would not be surprised if the Trump EEOC revisits that interpretation of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act. Therefore, an employee who suffers an adverse employment action due to their abortion may have a Title VII/Pregnancy Discrimination Act claim," she said.
For Florida's undocumented workforce, the situation is even more dire. Migrant and worker justice have long been linked in Florida, with undocumented workers facing increased risk of workplace hostility and abuse than documented workers. Access to medical care is also increasingly precarious. "Here in Florida, we are home to many undocumented families and workers, which is an additional barrier when you think about the costs and risks around taking time off of work to travel out of state. There is the real ID implementation at airports and ICE agents are now in airports," Hernandez explained, emphasizing the increasing risk for Florida's millions of undocumented residents forced into high-risk pathways to obtain abortions—professional, financially, and legally.
Despite the majority of Floridians having voted to protect abortion rights, the stigma around abortion is omnipresent in the workplace. The majority of clients that Hernandez has worked with have not felt comfortable disclosing their abortion to their employer. "We have had clients who have had medication abortion and gone to work during the bleeding process," Hernandez said. Put differently, workers have been forced, in some cases, to work while actively aborting a pregnancy—expelling blood clots that can be up to the size of a lemon with a fever beyond 100 degrees – for fear of losing their jobs. "I would not advise anyone to reveal personal health care facts to their employer," said Corbin.
Abortion bans and pregnancy surveillance: The body itself as a prison
The Supreme Court ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson was a disaster for abortion and health care in the South. The situation is even more horrific for incarcerated pregnant people subjected to additional reproductive abuse, neglect, and punishment by the state.
Even trade union bodies in Florida, despite being on the frontlines of progressive advocacy, appear reluctant to speak openly about abortion rights: of the five unions contacted for comment about reproductive rights, none responded. Moreover, none of the largest trade union bodies in Florida have made public statements about Amendment 4 or reproductive rights more generally. "In Florida, we have so many 'big bad bills,' there is a lot of misinformation, attacks on DEI, who [is labelled] a terrorist group, and a lot of other attacks coming from all different directions," Hernandez said.
For organizers like Angela Locarno and her colleagues at Central Florida Jobs for Justice, collective bargaining should be the entry point. "The contract is where rights become real," she says. "Through bargaining, unions have a direct opportunity to secure paid time off that covers reproductive care, without requiring workers to disclose personal medical information to supervisors. Employers also have a critical role to play. They can implement policies such as paid medical leave that includes reproductive healthcare, ensure that healthcare plans do not exclude abortion, and provide travel reimbursement when care is inaccessible due to state restrictions.
The anti-choice movement has marginalized workers in their own workplaces, making them vulnerable to legal targeting if they have any involvement with abortion (or, if the fourth iteration at 164 materializes, just working with miscarrying parents and fertility treatments). In a state with an increasing cost of living crisis, low union membership, and incessant anti-union laws, bodies are being controlled in a medical and legal sense. But perhaps more than this, a culture of silence has been propagated by anti-abortion lawmakers in the state, whereby economic coercion (both against the worker and employer) is a means to keep people silenced.
Unions and workers become hesitant to speak about abortion, especially their own right to an abortion or abortion-related expenses, because of well-supported fears of retaliation from workplaces and policymakers that are already fraught when it comes to workers' rights. Organizations like FAN are fronting costs in these fearful environments that the state and insurers (including workplace insurers) ought to cover, while toolkits like AbortionsUnitesUs and organizing groups like Central Florida Jobs for Justice provide some of the only publicly-available resources for workers wanting to advocate against anti-choice legislation and hostility.
Hernandez, Clinton, and Wheeler all share a sense of purpose and of fatigue, clearly overstretched and frustrated by nonstop anti-abortion and anti-worker legislation. Still, they remain focused and resolved, with the need for abortion continuing to be unwavering and unshrinking, despite the hopes of lawmakers, while the financial and psychological burden of seeking care only harms the workers who built and continue to build Florida.