Who will build Florida? Start with who'd want to
Florida's construction industry is asking where the workers went. For decades the state ran one of the cheapest labor models in America — worker protections scored near the bottom of the country — and filled the gap with immigrant labor that had little power to object. Now retirements and immigration enforcement have arrived at once, the training pipeline the industry let rot can't cover the difference, and the generation it needs has heard the stories. The shortage isn't a mystery. It's an invoice.
- The alarm, in the industry's own words: for every five trades workers who retire, only two replace them, and 41 percent of the workforce is expected to retire by 2031. “We're almost dead in the water because our workforce is gone,” the Northeast Florida Builders Association's president told the Wall Street Journal.
- The model that preceded it: Oxfam's 2026 index scores Florida's worker protections at 10.83 out of 100. Unemployment insurance caps at $275 a week for 12 weeks. The state has no heat standard for outdoor work — and in 2024 it banned its own cities and counties from writing one.
- What filled the gap was immigrant labor. A John Burns Research survey now finds nearly two-thirds of builders say immigration enforcement has hit their labor force, up from 13 percent a year ago; some jobs have lost 70 percent of their workers, and remaining crews have doubled their rates in places.
- The pipeline that wasn't built: during the cheap-labor decades Florida steered a generation toward college and shed half its construction workforce in the Great Recession. The industry is now spending millions rebuilding training it once got for free — about 25,000 active apprentices against a projected need of 669,000 skilled tradespeople.
The question is on the cover of Florida Trend: Who will build Florida? The industry's answers, in its own words, are alarmed ones. Richard Backa, the 2026 chair of the Associated Builders and Contractors of Florida, warns that “one thing that will cause a downturn faster than a lot of other things, believe it or not, is not having the workforce to build the projects they want to build.” Scott Brannock, president of the Northeast Florida Builders Association, put it more bluntly to the Wall Street Journal: “We're almost dead in the water because our workforce is gone.” Both men are describing a real crisis. What neither the magazine nor the industry dwells on is how Florida got a workforce model this fragile. It wasn't weather. It was a design — and for decades, it was a profitable one.
Start with the protections, or rather their absence. Florida has been a right-to-work state since 1944. In Oxfam America's 2026 Best States to Work Index — which scores wages, worker protections and the right to organize — Florida ranks 30th overall, and its worker-protections score is 10.83 out of 100. The specifics underneath that score are not abstractions. Unemployment insurance in Florida pays a maximum of $275 a week, among the lowest caps in the country, for 12 weeks where most states pay 26. There is no state standard protecting outdoor workers from heat, in a state where roughly two million people work outside — and in 2024 the Legislature passed HB 433 to prohibit cities and counties from adopting heat protections of their own, killing a Miami-Dade proposal that would have required water, shade and a 10-minute break every two hours for construction and farm workers. Private-sector safety enforcement is federal OSHA or nothing; the state runs no plan of its own. The one major protection Florida workers have gained in a generation — the $15 minimum wage that took effect last month — was not granted by the model. Voters wrote it into the constitution themselves in 2020.
A labor regime that thin only works if the labor supply can't push back, and for decades Florida construction drew on a supply that largely couldn't: immigrant workers, many of them in subcontractor crews several layers removed from the companies whose names are on the projects. How deep the dependence ran has become visible only as it is withdrawn. A John Burns Research survey reported this week found nearly two-thirds of builders say immigration enforcement has impacted their labor force — up from 23 percent in March and 13 percent a year ago. Some jobs have lost 70 percent of their available workers; in places, the remaining crews have doubled their rates, and the National Association of Home Builders measured a 4.2 percent median jump in labor costs in a single month. Florida builders describe the mechanics in Florida Trend's companion reporting: patrols posted at active job sites in Miami-Dade, Monroe and Broward counties, workers detained an average of three days even when they held work permits, and a May 2025 raid on a Tallahassee student housing site that arrested more than 100 construction workers. The administration's answer is that deportations will lower housing costs and builders should hire U.S. citizens. Fair enough, as far as it goes. It does not train a single electrician.
Because while the cheap labor flowed, nobody built the pipeline behind it. Florida spent a generation steering its young people away from the trades: Bright Futures began in 1997, high schools competed on college placement rates, and after 2008 the state's colleges drifted away from career and technical education. DeeDee Rasmussen — a former Leon County school board member who now runs ABC's North Florida chapter — admits she was part of that shift, and now surveys the result: “We don't have the pipeline that we might have had.” The Great Recession did the rest. Between 2007 and 2012, Florida shed nearly half its construction employees, and the workforce has never fully come back: it stands at 95 percent of its 2006 peak, in one of the most active construction markets in America. Training a replacement generation takes a decade. The industry is in about year three of trying — because for the other thirty, it didn't have to.
So the two bills arrived together. The demographic one: for every five workers who retire from construction and the trades, only two step in, and 41 percent of the current workforce is expected to retire by 2031 — superintendents and project managers as well as electricians and plumbers. The average construction worker is 45 years old; nationally, the number of workers 55 and older has risen 70 percent since 2011. Florida counts about 655,000 construction employees against a projected need of 669,000 skilled tradespeople, in an industry that produced about 6 percent of the state's GDP last year. The enforcement bill landed on top of the demographic one, in the same season. The squeeze is not uniform — a Zonda survey found 30 percent of builders reporting labor disruptions in August, the highest share since early 2023, concentrated in Florida, Texas and California, while others report little impact — but where it hits, it hits crews that were already short.
The industry's response is real, and it is instructive: it is now paying, at retail, for what the old model supplied free. The Northeast Florida Builders Association invests $7.5 million a year in its own apprenticeship program — more than 500 apprentices, a new 43,000-square-foot Jacksonville training facility that opened in March, and a superintendent on that very job who graduated from the program. Statewide, 414 registered programs trained 24,919 students in 2024-25, registered apprentices are up 70 percent since 2018-19, the state has awarded another $14.6 million in apprenticeship grants against a record 25,000 active apprentices, and in July FloridaCommerce landed a $40 million federal grant to expand apprenticeships further. All of it is necessary. None of it is yet close to scale: the Alliance for America's Skilled Trades calculates that training pipelines produce 55 workers for every 100 needed, as we reported on October 18, and 25,000 apprentices is a down payment against a 669,000-worker need. Meanwhile the workarounds multiply — workers cross-trained across multiple trades, building components prefabricated offsite to need fewer hands, $1,000 exoskeletons bought to keep aging bodies on the job longer. Florida's builders are resourceful people solving, with money and machinery, a problem that used to be solved by other people's labor.
Which leaves the question the industry keeps not asking. A National Association of Home Builders survey this year found that 6 percent of young adults are interested in a career in construction. That number is usually reported as a marketing problem — the trades have an image issue, the story goes. But images come from somewhere. They come from fathers and uncles and older brothers who worked the crews; from communities that watched how the last generation of Florida's outdoor workers was treated — the heat with no standard, the $275 week when the job vanished, the officers at the job site gate. The industry's pitch to the next generation is a good one, and Florida Trend found the young man who proves it: an electrician near six figures at 26 who bought his first house at 19, no college debt. He is the magazine's opening story because he is, in its words, “one of relatively few.” The shortage, in the end, is not a mystery to be solved. It is an invoice arriving for a labor model that ran for decades on some of the cheapest terms in America — and the men now holding it are asking who will build Florida. The honest answer is that it will have to be people who believe the job will treat them better than it treated the people who did it before them. On the record of the last thirty years, that belief is the one thing Florida construction hasn't built yet.