ATLANTA (CN) — Part of a Florida law prohibiting employers from forcing employees to attend workplace training events on topics including race and inequality is unconstitutional, a unanimous panel of the Eleventh Circuit ruled on Monday.
A provision of Florida’s Individual Freedom Act — aka the "Stop WOKE Act" — that banned employers from holding mandatory workplace meetings if those meetings endorsed viewpoints the state found offensive is “a textbook regulation of core speech protected by the First Amendment,” the Atlanta-based appeals court ruled.
The law says employers cannot subject employees to mandatory trainings that promote any of eight progressive concepts. Those include ideas suggesting that members of one race, color, sex or national origin are morally superior to others, that a person is “inherently racist, sexist or oppressive” by virtue of his race or sex or that people should feel guilty about the actions of their ancestors.
Employers who forced their workers to hear those ideas could have been hit with hefty financial penalties, including up to $100,000 in punitive damages in court.
Nonprofit Protect Democracy Project challenged the law in a suit filed on behalf of two employers and a diversity training consultant against Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and other state officials.
The three plaintiff companies — Honeyfund.com, Primo Tampa and Collective Concepts — claimed the law unfairly prevented them from sharing their viewpoints. Attorneys for the state have tried to justify the act as an anti-discrimination law aimed at preventing employers from punishing workers who do not want to listen to offensive speech.
The Eleventh Circuit panel was unconvinced by the state’s arguments, finding that giving favoritism to some viewpoints over others is a classic violation of the First Amendment.
“By limiting its restrictions to a list of ideas designated as offensive, the act targets speech based on its content. And by barring only speech that endorses any of those ideas, it penalizes certain viewpoints — the greatest First Amendment sin,” U.S. Circuit Judge Britt Grant wrote on behalf of the three-judge panel.
The ruling upholds a Florida federal judge’s 2022 decision to grant a preliminary injunction blocking enforcement of the provision. Chief U.S. District Judge Mark Walker found that the challenged part of the law is a “naked viewpoint-based regulation on speech.”
The panel on Monday agreed, ruling that the state conceded the law draws distinctions on what topics should be allowed at mandatory workplace meetings based on views taken by speakers — “the most pernicious of dividing lines under the First Amendment,” Grant, a Donald Trump appointee, wrote.
“Florida may be exactly right about the nature of the ideas it targets. Or it may not. Either way, the merits of these views will be decided in the clanging marketplace of ideas rather than a codebook or a courtroom,” Grant wrote, adding, “No matter how controversial the ideas, allowing the government to set the terms of the debate is poison, not antidote.”
The panel also flatly rejected the state’s claim that the provision merely restricts the meetings from being held, not the speech that takes place during them.
“The fact that only mandatory meetings that convey a particular message and viewpoint are prohibited makes quick work of Florida’s conduct-not-speech defense,” Grant wrote.
Protect Democracy attorney Shalini Goel Agarwal applauded the ruling in a statement on Monday, saying, “Barring employers from engaging in speech that powerful politicians don’t like is a move straight out of the authoritarian playbook. Today is a good day for the First Amendment and the ability of American businesses to speak freely.”
A spokesperson for DeSantis did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday afternoon.
Grant was joined in the opinion by U.S. Circuit Judge Charles Wilson, appointed by Bill Clinton, and U.S. Circuit Judge Andrew Brasher, a Trump appointee.
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