Florida Attorney General sues Biden administration over mess resulting from anti-union law Gov. DeSantis championed

Instead of attending to other pressing needs in Florida, such as fighting wage theft, Republican State Attorney General Ashley Moody is suing the Biden administration over complications of a controversial state law that was crafted to undermine Florida’s public sector unions.

The law, championed by Florida governor and presidential candidate Ron DeSantis, imposes new requirements on public worker unions that make it more difficult for them to survive. The law bans the decades-old, more convenient practice of deducting union dues from paychecks and imposes costly financial audits that even one Republican lawmaker admitted could threaten smaller unions’ survival.

It also makes it harder for unions to remain certified and bargain for better pay and working conditions for the over 150,000 workers they represent in Florida, ranging from 911 dispatchers to teachers, nurses, garbage collectors and bus drivers.

Gov. DeSantis gleefully approved the law in May, calling it “paycheck protection.”

Attorney General Moody’s lawsuit, filed Wednesday, focuses on a dispute regarding a specific provision of the law affecting unions that represent transit workers, such as bus drivers.

It claims that White House officials in the federal labor and transportation departments — including Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg and acting Secretary of Labor Julie Su — are unlawfully threatening to withhold hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding for Florida’s mass transit systems, due to provisions of the new state law.

In a news release, Moody’s office — which frequently spends time and money butting heads with the federal government — described the alleged move as “retaliation.”

“Florida passed laws to protect workers from being strong-armed by unions. Biden, intent on driving our country into the ground, continues to try to force states to implement his bad policies,” Moody said in a statement. “As long as I am Florida’s Attorney General, Washington will never decide how we run our state. We’re pushing back against this overreach to protect our state’s autonomy and Florida workers.”

Public transit systems, like the Lynx bus system and SunRail, benefit from federal grants. But under federal law, federal transit funds are contingent upon “the preservation of rights and benefits of employees under existing collective bargaining agreements” (aka union contracts) and “the continuation of collective bargaining rights.”

Essentially, if you mess with workers’ union rights, you’re not getting federal support.

Unions representing transit workers in Florida, such as the Amalgamated Transit Union and the Teamsters, raised alarm bells about this months ago, ahead of the Florida anti-union law’s passage.

Collective bargaining rights are enshrined in Florida’s state constitution (which Moody acknowledges in her lawsuit), but transit unions argued that the law’s restrictions on dues collection, as well as a new 60% membership threshold, would infringe on their existing union contracts — and it would do so at a major cost to Florida’s transit systems.

Orlando Weekly reported in March that unions warned the bill’s passage could risk the loss of over $500 million in federal transit funds in the first year of its implementation alone.

Shortly after, Florida Sen. Blaise Ingoglia — the Republican who sponsored the Senate version of the bill — added a carve-out of sorts, allowing transit unions to apply for a waiver if they had proof from the federal government that, without it, federal transit funds could be in jeopardy.

This was seen as a victory for the transit unions, representing thousands of workers statewide in communities all across Florida.

But, when the law passed and the state started drafting up these waivers, an issue emerged. And this is where the new lawsuit stems from.

Florida’s Public Employees Relations Commission (PERC), tasked with handling this waiver process, created waivers that were conditional and time-limited — based on the duration of a union’s current contract.

This condition was not added to the provision in state law allowing the waivers, so it’s unclear where it came from. When reached by phone, a PERC spokesperson deferred to their waiver orders, publicly available on their website, to explain the time-limited nature of their initial waivers.

This was confusing and frustrating to transit unions, according to a union representative Orlando Weekly spoke to who’s familiar with the situation. One of the unions that applied for the waiver had a contract expiring this year, on Sept. 30.

The feds weren’t impressed either. According to the lawsuit, the U.S. Department of Labor warned the state that those types of time-limited waivers did not comply with federal law. This rang those alarm bells again.

The Florida Public Transportation Association, a nonprofit organization that represents 45 transit systems across the state, warned in a letter to PERC in August that more than $800 million in federal funding for mass transit systems was in jeopardy if the commission didn’t issue waivers compliant with federal law.

This loss of funds “would be devastating to the public transportation industry in our state,” the organization wrote.

This eventually got the attention of Attorney General Moody, who took issue with the Department of Labor’s interpretation of the waivers and what she dramatically describes as an “ultimatum” issued by the feds: Follow federal law or you don’t get federal money.

But there’s a big “but” here.

The state commission did in fact take action in response to the federal government, which notified the commission that the waivers would need to at least cover the life of the federally funded project.

That could be years, even decades, depending on the details of the federal grant.

And PERC complied. Sort of. Stating that “time [was] of the essence,” per the lawsuit, the commission decided to grant conditional waivers that comply with the DOL’s guidance, while leaving open the ability of the state to challenge the DOL’s interpretation of their initial waivers.

As a result, federal funds are not currently in jeopardy, the union official said.

Conveniently, this development is not clarified, or even mentioned, in the Attorney General’s news release, published online Wednesday. A spokesperson for the office did not immediately provide an explanation for this omission ahead of publication.

The U.S. Department of Labor also did not respond to Orlando Weekly’s request for comment on the lawsuit, or its communications with PERC. The Federal Department of Transportation is unable to comment on pending litigation.

The lawsuit asks a federal judge to block federal agencies from withholding federal transit grants, and to declare unconstitutional the worker protection requirements under federal law that the state must comply with in order to receive federal grants for public transit projects.

The lawsuit alleges that White House officials within the Biden administration — specifically top officials within the Department of Labor and Department of Transportation — are “attempting to leverage a vague and general condition on federal funding to prevent Florida from reforming its collective bargaining process.”

The lawsuit also claims the Biden administration “seeks to elevate the political and financial interests of Florida’s public sector unions over the rights of working class Floridians to make that decision for themselves.”

Even though under Florida’s right-to-work policy, that’s already a decision workers can make — and have been able to make for decades.

Dozens of workers from across the state, including self-described Republicans, traveled to Tallahassee to speak out against the new law while it was still being debated by lawmakers.

The state law was based on a policy that’s been pushed by anti-union corporate interests, year after year, since at least 2011 (when then-State Rep. Matt Gaetz was leading the charge on it). It’s modeled after similar policies enacted or proposed in other states.

It’s been criticized by unions as explicitly political and transactional in nature, since unions representing firefighters and police officers, which generally endorse Republicans like Moody and DeSantis, are largely exempted from the new policy.

Florida unions affected have since been scrambling to comply with new requirements or risk decertification. Decertification would lead to the loss of union contracts, which include things like stipulations concerning pay, job benefits and workplace protections.

Multiple lawsuits have been filed by labor unions and individual union members against the state in the months since DeSantis signed the new policy into law, in an effort to block it. So far, none of those attempts have been successful.

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This article appears in Fall Guide.