Let me start by saying I HATE publishing sites. Sure they are great for branding and such but they are a pain on so many levels.
However, that’s what we use as our baseline site collection. Recently, I created a new site collection as a publishing site and it decided it needed a workflow to run when you decided to publish the site. We didn’t want that since the designers were just modifying the page and it was a laborious process to go through the workflow. So how do you disable this? Pretty easy, actually!
Navigate to the Pages library (View all site content for example). Click on the Library tab then Library Settings. Under General settings, click on Versioning settings. For “Require content approval for submitted items?” select the No radio button. That’s it!
You can go to Workflow settings and delete the workflow if you want but it’s not necessary.
The Grumpy Guru 