Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law a bill Friday, coinciding with International Workers’ Day, that will make it harder for public sector workers to form or maintain union representation.
The bill (SB 1296) is a follow-up to a bill passed in 2023 that similarly imposed new regulations for most public sector unions, with exceptions for unions representing police and firefighter unions, which generally endorse Republicans like DeSantis for office.
At the bill signing in Fort Myers Friday, DeSantis specifically called out “partisan” teachers’ unions as the target of the new law.
Neither he, nor other speakers at the bill signing, mentioned that the law will also affect other state government employees, such as public utility workers, healthcare professionals, and other municipal employees who help maintain city and county operations.
DeSantis said his signing of the legislation, sponsored by Fort Myers GOP Sen. Jonathan Martin, would “provide once and for all for the decertification of partisan teacher unions.” Rep. Jenna Persons-Mulicka, R-Fort Myers, who sponsored the bill in the Florida House, added, however, “This bill won’t end unions — the unions will end themselves when they lose their way and focus more on politics than on representing the employees at the bargaining table.”
Supporters of the legislation, flagged as potentially unconstitutional by Senate staff, claimed it was a “pro-employee” initiative that would hold public sector unions (save for the exempted police and firefighter unions) more accountable to their members.
Dozens of public employees, however — including self-described Republican voters — traveled up to Tallahassee over the course of the state legislative session earlier this year to speak out against it.
“This bill threatens my ability to protect my pay, my benefits, my working conditions. It limits my voice on the job and takes away from the only process workers like me have to stand up for ourselves,” Elizabeth Wiley, a public school bus driver, told a panel of Senate lawmakers, ahead of its final passage mostly along party lines.
“When decisions are made over our heads, when workers lose the ability to speak up, wages fall behind, benefits disappear, and families pay the price,” she said. “We’ve seen it before. We do not want to go back.”
The law will, in part, make it harder for workers to form, keep, or even decertify their unions by raising the threshold for how many workers need to vote in favor of forming a union in order for the union to prevail.
Under current law — and federal law for the private sector — a simple majority of workers must vote in favor of forming a union in order for the union to prevail. Under SB 1296, at least 50 percent of workers must vote in favor of forming, recertifying, or decertifying a union, in an election featuring at least 50 percent voter turnout.
For many larger public sector unions, including some of the state’s largest teachers unions, this will be a steep hill to climb. Under another anti-union law approved by DeSantis in 2023 (SB 256), unions have to go through annual recertification elections if fewer than 60 percent of the employees they represent are dues-paying members.
Notably, under Florida’s right-to-work law and a 2018 U.S. Supreme Court decision, choosing to pay union dues is entirely voluntary in the public sector, even if you still see benefit from having union representation.
“At a time when Floridians are struggling to pay their bills and dealing with skyrocketing costs for necessities like rent, childcare, groceries, and more, Gov. Ron DeSantis and anti-union, anti-worker legislators have focused on chipping away at the constitutionally enshrined rights of thousands of workers in the state,” said Florida Education Association president Andrew Spar, a former music teacher, in a statement Friday.
“Today, the Governor’s signing of SB 1296 is yet another entry in a long line of betrayals of working Floridians by Gov. DeSantis in favor of out-of-state, billionaire-backed, special interest groups,” he added.
A favor for special interest groups
One of the primary supporters of the legislation – enthusiastically namedropped by DeSantis on Friday — was the Freedom Foundation, an out-of-state think tank funded by billionaires that openly admits they believe government unions are the “root cause of every growing national dysfunction in America.”
The group’s main lobbyist in the South, Rusty Brown, admitted as much during a public hearing on the bill earlier this year. Brown, based out of Texas, is a former union avoidance consultant himself who previously served as a policy advisor in the U.S. Department of Labor during the first Trump administration.
Brown admitted to senators that the Washington State-based Freedom Foundation “consulted” on SB 1296, conveniently neglecting to mention emails from his group to the bill sponsors (later obtained by Orlando Weekly through a public records request) that include draft language for the bill, in addition to talking points.
“This legislation has nothing to do with our state but everything to do with his continued focus on his own national political ambitions,” said Dr. Rich Templin, director of politics and public policy for the Florida AFL-CIO — a statewide federation of labor unions — in a statement. “His focus is not on Floridians and their needs,” Templin argued.
Florida AFL-CIO president Kimberly Holdridge, a former official of the stageworkers union IATSE Local 631 in Orlando, said that the signing of this bill is a “temporary win” for anti-union special interest groups, but that they won’t ultimately prevail in the long run. The Florida AFL-CIO represents more than 1 million Florida union members, retirees, and their families.
“While wealthy special interests might believe they have the power in the halls of the Florida Capitol, Florida’s public sector workers have the power and support in our communities statewide to show them otherwise,” she said in a statement. “We will organize and come back stronger than ever.”
“While wealthy special interests might believe they have the power in the halls of the Florida Capitol, Florida’s public sector workers have the power and support in our communities statewide to show them otherwise”
Kimberly Holdridge, president of the Florida AFL-CIO
A history of surviving attacks on public sector unions
Public sector unions in Florida and across the U.S. have faced backlash from union-hostile governments for more than a century — even before public employees were granted collective bargaining rights — so this is nothing new.
Neither is a show of militancy from union activists, including Florida teachers who organized the first national teachers’ strike in U.S. history in 1968 (even though it was illegal at the time) in a fight for the same things they’re advocating for today: more funding for public education and living wages for teachers.
“Floridians are tired of their public schools, colleges, and universities suffering under the weight of policies that have underfunded our public schools, added more barriers for our education professionals, attempted to strip academic freedom from our higher education institutions, and ultimately shortchanged our students,” said Spar. “Florida’s workers and parents will continue to fight for every student in Florida to access the public education they deserve and have a constitutional right to receive.”
Although DeSantis and his anti-union allies attempted to dismantle the state’s teachers unions in 2023, through the passage of SB 256, that law has failed to get rid of a single K-12 union — despite casualties among adjunct faculty unions and more than 100 other public employee unions both in and outside of the school system.
Spar, and other labor leaders in Florida, believe SB 1296 is intended to deliver a kill shot to the state’s teachers unions. Although whether that plays out or not, in practice, is yet to be seen. Templin, for his part, told Orlando Weekly after the bill’s passage that he’d heard optimistic remarks from labor leaders across the state, who were confident they could survive the bill’s new restrictions.
The 2023 bill, SB 256, prohibited payroll union dues deductions, forcing unions to scramble to sign up members for an alternative way to pay member dues. It also forced annual recertification elections for many unions — most of which have been successful for unions since the law took effect.
“I have been actually brought back from the cliff from local union leaders who are saying, ‘Hey, we’ve just got to work, we’ve just got to organize. Like, we can do this,” Templin told Orlando Weekly in March. “We’ve just got to work harder. We’ve got to work smarter, and we will survive. And that’s from the folks on the ground who actually do this difficult work.”
The bill, notably, was watered down from its original version ahead of its passage, and garnered ‘no’ votes from 13 Republicans in the House and Senate. The original version would have established more deadly union election rules similar to those already enacted in Wisconsin and Iowa. The bill also increases financial penalties for illegal public employee strikes — another request of the Freedom Foundation, to adjust for “inflation” — but even those increases were ultimately reduced as well.
DeSantis’ signing of the SB 1296 Friday, nonetheless, is a rich show of power from a state Legislature and governor who’s adopted an usually antagonistic attitude toward lab-grown meat, a diverse book collection in school libraries, rent control, and angering bad bosses who don’t want any government pressure to provide their outdoor workers with reasonable protections from extreme heat.
The law will take effect July 1, 2026.
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