The Florida legislature will soon be in session again. Following the deregulation fiasco of last year I have to wonder if our state society is prepared for another challenge to our profession's status or will they be caught totally flat footed again?
Gov. Slick Rick has said that he wants to revisit deregulation of professions again as a way to streamline government and cut government regulations.
Some of these "professions" need to be deregulated. A license to do hair? A license to hang curtains? Really? All these regulations do is give bureaucrats something to do by threatening to throw people in jail. It also hurts the public by limiting competition and keeping prices high.
That being said, I'm against removing the license requirement of learned professions, such as surveying, engineering and architecture.
The reason why a license for cosmotology is required is because these people work with tools that need to be cleaned and cared for properly to avoid spreading viruses and parasites ... it's a public saftey issue ... and they were the first to get off the list, and rightly so.
A "license to hang curtains" is a load of bull ... there is no license for interior decorating. The license is (or was) for “interior design”, which was remodeling and renovation, and required the people to know a little something about construction and architecture. Most of those people went to college and worked hard to get their licenses, and they were thrown under the bus with a lot of other professionals, and nearly surveyors.
Thank you, Pseudo!
I don't have the specific examples in front of me, but several states have punished people for hiring themselves out to decorate the interior of a home because those people did not have a license.
TPR - You beat me to it. My soon to be wife recently received her Cosmetology license. I asked her the same question -- What in the hell do you need a license for to cut hair? After helping her study for the exam, I now know. I never thought that Biology course would have been helpful to an Engineer 20 years later. 🙂
Yes, and the cosmetology lobby walked into the first committee meeting with an amendment prepared to remove them from the list. And were was the state survey society? From what I saw at the meeting, picking their noses and scratching their asses. They were totally unprepared for what happened and they went into panic mode. And of course, when all was said and done, they were quick to take all of the credit for saving the profession.
The official story is that their lobbiest was assured that surveyors would be removed from the bill before it went to the committees. They were caught off gaurd when we were not. I don't see them making this mistake again.
BTW, I checked on last year's bill and, to my surprise, the Senate rejected even the slimmed down bill that the House passed. I lost interest in the bill after surveyor's were removed, and I assumed it passed. The reason cited by the Senate for rejecting the bill is that the House tried to backdoor the bill by calling it a Budget Bill rather than a Policy Bill. A Bugdet Bill doesn't have to be introduced into both branches for consideration. Only the House had committee meetings on this bill, passed it, and was hoping the Senate would vote on it without much consideration. Policy Bills have to be introduced into both branches for consideration.
This is another reason why FSMS thought the bill was dead, as explained to me in an early email. They expected it be entered as a policy bill, rather than a budget bill, and they knew the Senate did not have the bill up for consideration, which would have made it DOA.