A circuit court judge last week dismissed a request from a Florida faculty union to temporarily block a 2023 Florida law that has already caused tens of thousands of public employees in the state — including Orange County government employees — to lose their union representation and the rights afforded to them under their union contracts.
The United Faculty of Florida at Florida A&M University and one of the university’s professors filed a complaint with the circuit court earlier this year against the state’s Public Employees Relations Commission, arguing the law (SB 256) unconstitutionally abridges Florida workers’ collective bargaining rights.
The law, dubbed “paycheck protection” by Gov. Ron DeSantis, banned the decades-old practice of allowing union members to pay dues via payroll deduction, and requires at least 60 percent of employees a union represents to be dues-paying members in order for the union to remain certified. Unions that fall below that threshold must annually petition the state for a recertification election. Those that do not are decertified.
Unions representing police officers, firefighters and correctional officers were notably (and controversially) exempted from the law’s stringent requirements, similar to one in Wisconsin that was recently overturned.
“I cannot in good conscience tell somebody who puts their lives on the line every day for us to work second and third shifts, and then go have to meet the union representative to give them a check and not get any sleep for that night,” explained Senate bill sponsor Blaise Ingoglia, R-Spring Hill, in defense of the carve-out last year.
So far in Florida, more than 90 bargaining units — essentially groups of workers represented by a union — have been decertified since SB 256 took effect, largely due to a failure of the unions to petition the state for recertification. Doing so requires gathering signed, dated cards of support from at least 30 percent of employees — a time-consuming, costly and resource-intensive process. Many of these bargaining units, representing blue-collar county, city and school employees, were first certified decades ago.
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Leon County Circuit Court judge Jonathan Sjostrom, however, didn’t buy the plaintiffs’ argument that portions of the law violate employees constitutional rights. Under the Florida Constitution, workers are guaranteed the right to collectively bargain. However, Sjostrom wasn’t convinced the new law’s changes to union certification requirements actually violate workers’ collective bargaining rights, as argued.
He rejected the argument that the new recertification process is “so onerous as to effect a practical elimination of union representation.” A union recertification election, he pointed out, “requires only a majority vote as opposed to a monetary commitment by potential members.”
The ruling is undeniably a blow for the UFF-FAMU faculty union, which reported 56.6 percent dues-paying membership to the state this year, below the 60 percent required. The union has since filed a petition for a recertification election that has yet to take place.
Andrew Spar, president of UFF’s parent union, the Florida Education Association, told Orlando Weekly in a statement that their members “have overwhelmingly shown their desire to have a union and show their support by paying membership dues, yet the arbitrary thresholds set in this anti-freedom, anti-worker bill seek to dismantle this collective bargaining unit along with the constitutional right faculty and graduate teaching assistants have to be represented by a union.”
“Despite this ruling, we will not stop fighting for educators’ right to advocate for themselves and their students,” he added, arguing that the merits of this case “are
yet to be decided.”
No membership threshold had previously existed for faculty unions, or for most other public employee unions before the law’s enactment. Only K-12 teachers’ unions — a common target of the anti-union, pro-privatization right wing — were required to have a dues-paying membership of at least 50 percent, under a 2018 law approved by then-Gov. Rick Scott.
Because Florida is a right-to-work state, becoming a dues-paying union member is completely voluntary, even if your job is covered by a union and you benefit from union representation. This makes it harder to recruit new members, especially among a workforce that is often paid less than their similarly educated private-sector counterparts, and is increasingly struggling to afford Florida’s cost of living. Unions can help shrink the so-called public-sector wage gap, according to a report from the Economic Policy Institute, at a time when many state and local governments continue to face staffing shortages.
While this latest complaint over Florida’s SB 256 does not fall in unions’ favor, unions did score a small victory earlier this month in a separate lawsuit filed by teachers’ unions in federal court. Siding with the plaintiffs, U.S. District Judge Mark Walker ruled that the law required public employers to impair existing collective bargaining agreements that had guaranteed the right to payroll dues deduction, in violation of a “contracts clause” in the U.S. Constitution.
The ruling affirming unconstitutional impairment of existing contracts does little to help most of Florida’s affected public sector unions, since most of the unions have either had to find a new way to collect union dues since SB 256 took effect, or have since renegotiated new collective bargaining agreements with employers.
“At the end of the day, it’s more of a ‘We were right, they were wrong’ ruling than anything else,” Spar told Orlando Weekly in an interview earlier this month. “The state of Florida put pressure on school districts to cease payroll dues deductions immediately when the law was passed, and what this ruling says is they shouldn’t have done that.”
Other public employers, such as county and city governments, were similarly under pressure to violate the rights of their employees under workers’ existing union contracts in accordance with the law.
But not all complied.
As WLRN reported last year, Florida’s Miami-Dade College continued to allow its faculty to pay union dues through payroll, arguing that doing so was a right that faculty had under their existing union contract.
A spokesperson for the city of Orlando recently confirmed that they also continued to honor their employees’ right to dues deduction under an agreement the city has with the Laborers’ International Union of North America. That existing contract, negotiated in 2022, doesn’t expire until Oct. 2025. “LIUNA deductions will occur through the end of the agreement, which remains effective through Sept. 30, 2025,” the city spokesperson confirmed.
Once existing agreements expire, however, future contracts won’t be able to contain that same right, under SB 256. The recent ruling from Judge Walker — affirming employers like the city of Orlando were correct in continuing to honor existing contracts — doesn’t change that.
Spar, whose union was a plaintiff in the recent dues deduction complaint, argues the ruling nonetheless has given the union “some vindication” in that Gov. DeSantis was “100 percent wrong” in his approval of SB 256 and “should not have done what he did.”
None of the bargaining units that have been decertified so far as a result of the law have been K-12 teachers unions — a fact that Spar and others in union leadership take pride in and see as a hopeful sign. “We have won all 25 [recertification] elections with an average yes vote of over 90%,” he said, adding that dozens of their bargaining units are still awaiting their recertification elections, due to the state’s backlog.
“So what teachers, staff and professors in this state have said is they want a union, and they will work to keep their union,” Spar argued. “And they will jump through all these ridiculous hoops that is costing taxpayers millions and millions of dollars every year. They will do that to keep their constitutional right intact.”
Florida is the only state in the U.S. South — a region considered hostile to unions — that guarantees the right to collective bargaining in its state Constitution. The law, SB 256, was reportedly drafted by out-of-state special interest groups like the Freedom Foundation, affiliated with the conservative State Policy Network.
“Florida has become a billionaires’ playground,” Dr. Rich Templin, chief lobbyist for the Florida AFL-CIO, told Orlando Weekly in February. “This is, you know, ground zero for these billionaire-funded think tanks where these guys are literally going from state to state and messing with people’s lives because they have nothing else to do but count their money.”
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This article appears in Nov 27 – Dec 3, 2024.
