In recent decades, local governments have stepped up to tackle some of the most pressing economic challenges of our time, including raising minimum wages, developing popular paid leave programs, and ensuring that public contracts lead to good jobs and stimulate local economic development. Local action to raise wages or strengthen labor standards has often been motivated by state and federal inaction in the face of stagnating wages and growing income inequality. Many such local policy innovations have in turn served as important models for popular new state legislation and for the inclusion of important labor standards in major federal laws, such as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act.
At the same time, the ability of local policymakers to innovate and address local economic conditions has increasingly faced obstruction from state legislatures through the abusive use of preemption—state laws that block, override, or limit local ordinances on workers’ rights.
For nearly a decade, the Economic Policy Institute has tracked the spread of state laws that preempt workers’ rights and limit local democracy. New updates to EPI’s workers’ rights preemption tracker document the most recent legislative changes and point to both troubling and promising developments:
- Following a significant wave of copycat laws enacted in the early to mid-2010s, harmful state preemption laws have continued to spread to new geographies and issues. Though the pace of legislatures adopting new laws preempting local worker rights policies has slowed, the spread of preemption to other areas of local policymaking has only accelerated.
- A longstanding trend of lawmakers in majority-white state legislatures obstructing local policymaking in majority-Black-and-brown communities has intensified in a few states, with sweeping “Death Star” bills that attempt to strip local control across a stunningly broad array of policy areas.
- In a few recent instances, advocates have succeeded in reversing or resisting harmful state preemption laws, and recent workers’ rights ballot initiative victories continue to demonstrate that preemption laws blocking popular labor rights policies are counter to the democratic will of voters.
Abusive state preemption continues to deepen inequality for all workers, and especially widens racial and gender wage and wealth gaps
As EPI’s tracking map shows, abusive preemption of workers’ rights is most prevalent in the South followed by the Midwest, in states where conservative lawmakers have long used preemption to stifle local government action, often under pressure from corporate interests and right-wing groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council.
In two previous reports, EPI has documented that preemption laws have a disproportionate effect on workers of color, women, and immigrants and deepen economic and racial inequality. In some states, preemption laws passed by majority-white legislatures have targeted the democratic authority of cities with majority-Black populations. For example, in 2016, the Alabama state legislature blocked a minimum wage increase in the city of Birmingham, where 69.2% of residents were Black. By contrast, Alabama’s state legislature at the time was 75% white.
In many cases, cities with higher poverty levels attempt to pass legislation with poverty-reducing effects, but their efforts are thwarted by the state legislature. For example, in 2015, Kansas City and St. Louis—cities with significantly higher poverty rates than the state as a whole— attempted to address poverty among low-wage workers by increasing their local minimum wage, but the state preempted the increase.
New updates to EPI’s worker rights’ preemption tracker show these trends accelerating and expanding to new policy areas in some states.
State preemption of workers’ rights expanding to new issues and geographies
Our workers’ rights preemption tracker includes legislation enacted in additional states over the past two years, plus a new tab to capture state laws that have initiated a new trend of states blocking adoption of local heat standards—laws designed to protect workers from extreme heat.
Heat standards
When Texas—a state where workers across myriad industries face regular, dangerous exposure to extreme heat—failed to pass a state-level heat standard, local leaders worked to fill the gap. Lawmakers and advocates in both Austin and Dallas have long recognized the vital need to protect vulnerable workers from heat exposure; both cities passed their own heat standard ordinances mandating water and shade breaks for construction workers more than a decade ago. Dallas’s law has protected workers since 2015 and Austin’s since 2010. In Florida, another state with sweltering summers and limited worker protections, Miami city officials proposed a similar ordinance in 2023. Without heat standards, workers can be forced to labor in extreme temperatures without necessary periodic access to water, shade, or breaks to prevent increased risk of heat illness, heat stroke, or even death.
In addition to outdoor workers like farmers and construction workers who are exposed to extreme temperatures, many indoor laborers in animal processing, manufacturing, warehouses, and similar occupations work in facilities without climate control or where temperatures are elevated further by industrial ovens or blast furnaces.
Unfortunately, local efforts to enact worker heat protections were blocked in both Texas and Florida. Texas is the state where the highest number of workers die from high temperatures: Between 2011 and 2021, at least 42 workers died in Texas from environmental heat exposure. Despite this, lawmakers have not only refused to pass a state-level heat standard, but in Texas they went so far as to pass a sweeping preemption law in 2023 that nullified Austin and Dallas’s long-standing measures and prevented similar future efforts. Similarly, the Florida state legislature passed HB433 in 2024 prohibiting all municipalities from enacting worker heat protections and overruling Miami’s proposal.
While the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has proposed a federal heat standard, the rule is unlikely to be finalized under the new Trump administration. Though two states preempt heat standards at a local level, the vast majority do not. Between a federal government committed to rolling back protections for workers and a global climate crisis that continues to exacerbate extreme temperatures, state and local governments must be the ones to address this critical occupational safety problem.
“Death Star” bills
The new Texas law blocking heat standards was sweeping in scope—representing the most recent instance of so-called Death Star preemption bills. These vague, wide-reaching bills are aimed at preempting local control across a broad range of policy areas, often including any and all laws related to workers’ rights and job quality. In 2023, for example, Florida passed broad preemption legislation that allows businesses to sue local governments and immediately halt any ordinance they believe to be “arbitrary or unreasonable.” Texas’s 2023 preemption law goes one step further and outright blocks local decision-making on every single category that EPI’s preemption map tracks, including heat standards. Though the legislation is currently embroiled in legal challenges, its existence has already had a chilling effect on localities in Texas. Even when contested or repealed, Death Star bills create an environment of uncertainty and fear that stalls local progress. States including Iowa and Michigan (where the “Death Star” label was first applied to a preemption bill) had previously passed wide-ranging legislation blocking local policymaking affecting nearly any employment practice, putting a halt to significant local initiatives to raise wages and improve other working conditions in these Midwestern states.
Gig economy
For a decade, tech companies have aggressively backed state legislation to prohibit local governments from setting labor standards or regulating fares, licensing, insurance, safety, or other practices of “transportation network” or “delivery network” companies like Uber, Lyft, or DoorDash. While the most important innovations in setting wages and standards to address the rise of gig work have continued to emerge from the local level in cities such as Seattle and New York City, tech companies have lobbied heavily to block such action wherever possible. With the most recent additions of Hawaii and Washington in 2022, 44 states now have laws preempting cities from setting certain standards for “transportation network companies.” Many of these same states (including Georgia since 2022) also specify that drivers who connect to jobs via a digital app are to be considered independent contractors, barring them from all the rights and protections afforded by employee status. These company-backed laws now prevent cities in most states from adopting wage and labor standards to improve conditions for a workforce of disproportionately Black, brown, and immigrant drivers.
Project labor agreements and prevailing wages
With the addition of Texas (where new Death Star legislation is currently in effect though under court challenge), 24 states now bar localities from entering into project labor agreements (PLAs) and 12 states bar localities from adopting their own prevailing wage requirements for public projects.
Prevailing wages and PLAs help ensure workers are treated fairly and paid a living wage while performing jobs under government contracts. Prevailing wage laws require contractors on public projects to pay at least the average wage for a given occupation in the locality. This ensures contractors bidding for public work will compete on the basis of quality, efficiency, or productivity rather than by lowering wages. Project labor agreements are multi-party agreements used to set the terms and conditions of employment on major projects. PLAs set clear, legally binding wage, benefit, and safety standards across an entire project that allow a local government to ensure that public investments are generating high-quality jobs. PLAs also help keep projects on task—saving local governments time and money—by coordinating large numbers of individual contractors and their workforces.
In the past four years, localities in states with preemption laws missed out on new opportunities to use these key policy tools to shape the quality of construction jobs created by massive federal investments flowing to local governments via the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Preemption of PLAs likewise left many local governments at a distinct disadvantage when seeking competitive federal funds under programs that encouraged or required use of PLAs to ensure quality job outcomes on BIL- or IRA-funded public infrastructure or green energy projects.
Preemption of workers’ rights has expanded to restrict other local policies that decrease poverty, increase housing access, and protect the rights of immigrants
In addition to workers’ rights policies tracked by EPI, new forms of local policymaking designed to improve economic conditions for working people have become targets in recent years.
Guaranteed income programs
For example, some states have blocked local efforts to implement or even pilot guaranteed income programs. Many local policymakers have begun experimenting with such programs to decrease poverty and improve access to housing for all. Stockton, California, for example, implemented a basic income program from 2019 to 2022, during which 125 residents were provided with $500 a month for 24 months, measurably improving their ability to cover housing costs and find full-time employment. Another trial program in Denver, Colorado, provided adults experiencing homelessness with cash payments for a year, resulting in a dramatic increase in the percentage of participants who could obtain rented or owned housing, from 8% to 35%.
Although early evidence shows local guaranteed income programs have proven effective, several states have already moved to ban guaranteed income programs. Arkansas, Iowa, Idaho, and South Dakota have all passed preemption laws that block cities and counties from implementing guaranteed income programs, and Tennessee and Texas are now considering similar legislation. Republican legislatures have even preempted guaranteed income programs in states where no pilot programs existed, an aggressive act of “preemptive preemption” designed to limit policymaking powers of progressive cities rather than to respond to issues constituents are raising.
Immigrant worker rights
In the past five years, a growing number of states have enacted laws preempting local government policies that in any way limit use of local resources or involvement of local law enforcement in federal immigration enforcement (sometimes called sanctuary policies). These constraints on local governments are especially damaging at a moment when the federal government is actively seeking new ways to compel state and local governments to participate in immigration enforcement actions that threaten to violate civil liberties, encourage racial profiling, and cause massive economic hardship for families and local communities. Despite these growing pressures, it remains legal for local governments to adopt sanctuary polices where not preempted by state law. Many local governments have continued to refuse involvement with immigration enforcement because they recognize that fear instilled by anti-immigrant attacks leads to fewer people reporting crimes or worker rights violations, making worker exploitation more likely and leaving communities and workplaces less safe for everyone.
Persistent campaigns to reverse harmful preemption are achieving limited success
Two states have successfully repealed three state laws that previously preempted local minimum wage or paid leave ordinances.
In 1997, the Arizona state legislature passed a law preempting local minimum wages higher than the federal minimum wage. In 2006, however, Arizona voters passed Proposition 202, which established a higher state minimum wage, enacted paid leave requirements, and reversed the preemption law. Ten years later, the Arizona legislature again attempted to preempt workers’ rights when it passed HB 2579, a bill to prohibit cities and counties from requiring employers to provide employees paid sick days or paid family leave—directly overruling Proposition 202. Within a year, however, this law was struck down in court because it violated a 1999 proposition which prohibits the state legislature from amending or superseding voter-approved initiatives. Since the preemption repeal, both Tucson and Flagstaff have passed local minimum wages that exceed state law.
In 2019 in Colorado, lawmakers repealed a 1999 minimum wage preemption law. Four localities have since adopted higher minimum wages, addressing challenges facing low-wage workers in cities with higher costs of living.
For the past two years, workers and advocates in Michigan have worked to repeal state preemption of local workers’ rights measures, most recently supporting SB 1173, which would repeal the state’s preemption of local project labor agreements, following attempts in 2023 to pass two earlier bills which would have completely reversed Michigan’s preemption of a wide range of important labor standards. Though these bills have not yet passed, they serve as important recent models for other states fighting to repeal harmful preemption laws.
Other recent bright spots in the ongoing struggle to overturn harmful preemption laws include Tennessee. In 2024, Think Tennessee, an affiliate in EPI’s EARN network, was part of a successful campaign to repeal 2016 state legislation that had banned inclusionary zoning, reinstating the rights of local jurisdictions to enact measures which promote affordable housing.
In other cases, advocates have succeeded in repeatedly fending off major preemption threats. For example, the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy and other West Virginia advocates for local governance have for nine years successfully resisted the passage of a Death Star bill in the state.
It’s past time to lift state bans on workers’ rights
Despite significant opposition, workers, advocates, and lawmakers persist in their efforts to overturn preemption laws, restore local democracy, and protect workers’ rights. State legislators should heed these calls and lift bans on workers’ rights policymaking.
Reversing abusive state preemption of local workers’ rights policymaking is an important priority, especially in the present context of growing federal attacks on fundamental workers’ rights and labor standards—and threats to the separation of powers and democracy itself. Moreover, the workers’ rights policies preempted in many states continue to prove especially popular, showing that preemption laws are in direct conflict with the will of voters. Across the country, when given the opportunity voters continue to approve ballot measures increasing the minimum wage, expanding paid leave, and strengthening workers’ rights to unionize, including in states where legislatures have blocked localities from enacting some of these very same policies. Such outcomes reflect a clear ongoing trend of strong voter support for policies that prioritize worker, racial, and gender justice—preferences that are being denied by too many state legislatures.
To reflect voters’ strong interest in addressing longstanding economic problems like stagnating wages, stark income inequality, and eroding job quality, state lawmakers must stop using preemption laws to block workers’ rights and restore the ability of local officials to do what’s best for their constituents and communities.
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