Curtis Hierro, a union organizer with the Communications Workers of America labor union, grew up in poverty in South Miami Dade County.
His father was incarcerated for getting caught up in the drug trade. His mother was a sex worker. He grew up in homelessness, in "communities of struggle."
But he made it out of that life. How?
“Because I had a strong grandmother, and because I found the labor movement — and I'm not alone,” Hierro told the Florida House State Affairs Committee Tuesday afternoon, his voice rising with his impassioned message.
Hierro shared his personal story, similar to a number of other working class Floridians, during testimony on House Bill 1445, a Republican-sponsored bill targeting most of Florida’s public sector unions.
The bill ultimately passed by the committee, with all 6 Democrats opposed, 14 Republicans in favor, and one absent Republican vote.
This favorable vote occurred despite over an hour of public testimony from union members and a couple non-union opponents of the bill in solidarity from across the state.
It now heads to the full House floor, where it’s likely to pass.
Among other things, the bill would ban the automatic payroll deduction of union dues from union members’ paychecks (an inconvenience that workers describe as "government overreach"), and would require unions to maintain a membership of 60% of eligible employees in order to remain certified, or risk decertification.
It's unpopular.
Florida educators, who are currently facing an onslaught of "culture war" educational policies designed to make their jobs harder and less appealing, oppose the bill.
Private sector union members, who aren’t directly targeted by the bill, have come out to oppose it.
Republican union members have also spoken out against it.
“This bill kind of reminds me of my ex-wife,” one Republican worker told Florida lawmakers, with his current wife filming him on her phone beside the podium.
“My ex-wife was always doing the extra: extra this, extra that," he shared, earning no small number of gasps and laughter from those in the committee room. "So, this bill has a bunch of 'extra' in it that is not needed."
That was some difficult public testimony to follow.
Other self-described Republican union members, speaking to the majority-Republican committee, said the bill infringes on their freedom to pay their union dues as they like.
“Don’t tell me how to handle my paycheck,” said Chris Payne, a Republican teacher of 32 years in Nassau County, and a former soldier of 25 years. “It’s not big enough anyway, so don’t tell me what to do with it.”
Several union members said that it essentially forces workers in a right-to-work state like Florida to become union members to keep their union (and their union contract, containing agreements on things such as wages, health insurance, and job benefits) alive.
The committee passed it anyway.
But we’ve seen this before.
Here we go again
Late last month, Florida’s GOP-dominated Senate approved a Senate version of the bill (SB 256) on the Senate floor, after facing its own wave of opposition from dozens of union members and Democratic lawmakers during its committee stops.
Just five Republican Senators crossed party lines that time to oppose it.
Both bills are interpreted as an attack on Florida’s teachers unions, which make up a large chunk of Florida’s unionized public sector workforce, and which have had a target painted on their backs by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
However, unions representing a wide range of public workers, including public sector resident physicians, represented by the 1199 SEIU, working upward of 80 hours per week; 911 dispatchers; garbage collectors; educational support staff and school counselors, and more would be affected. All in all, over 150,000 workers across the state.
Both bills carve out unions representing police officers, firefighters, corrections and probation officers, which traditionally endorse Republicans for office and generously donate to Republican candidates' campaign funds.
After Orlando Weekly reported that the bill’s passage could threaten the state's ability to secure federal transit funds, Sen. Ingoglia, who’s sponsored SB 256, filed an amendment adding public transit workers to the laundry list of workers exempted from his “pro-union” legislation.
Florida Rep. Dean Black, who’s behind the House version, also claimed on Tuesday that the bill “will strengthen unions,” pointing to teachers unions that had to scramble to raise their membership after former Gov. Rick Scott signed into law a 50% membership threshold, solely for educator unions, in 2018.
Teacher unions largely avoided decertification after that law passed, but several teachers have told Orlando Weekly that it's not that simple.
Because Florida’s a right-to-work state, you don’t have to be a dues-paying member in order to benefit from a union contract covering your workplace.
This makes it harder for unions to convince union members to sign up and financially support their union, to help make it into a stronger fighting unit.
Similar legislation to HB 1445 has been introduced year after year since 2011, when it was then-Rep. Matt Gaetz leading the charge, similar to legislators in a number of state legislatures across the country at the time.
Last year, in 2022, a similar bill for public sector unions — imposing a 50% membership threshold, as well as a ban on automatic dues deductions — narrowly avoided passage.
It passed the House, but not the Senate.
This year’s different.
Republican lawmakers have been emboldened by their supermajority in Florida’s state legislature, which essentially allows them to streamline and advance their political priorities.
Florida Democrats, outnumbered, possess less power when it comes to voting on legislation to shut those initiatives down.
During discussion and debate in the State Affairs Committee, Democrats still spoke strongly against the bill, and not a single Democrat voted in favor.
“This bill, to me, is a part of this insidious cadre of bills that are targeted at working people, targeting Black and brown folks in the state of Florida,” said Rep. Michele Rayner-Goolsby, D-St. Petersburg, referencing the fact that historically, the public sector has been a key employer for people of color.
Rep. Robin Bartleman, also a Democrat, said if Republicans really wanted to level the playing field for union workers, the GOP could trash a provision of Florida's state constitution that bars public sector workers from striking.
"That’s leveling the playing field,” she said, to applause from members of the public.
Dozens of union members from across the state, who come from a diversity of occupational backgrounds, have traveled to Tallahassee to ask lawmakers to oppose the bill.
As some Democrats and union members critical of the bill have pointed out, it’s right-wing think tanks and organizations like the Florida Chamber of Commerce, the James Madison Institute and the Freedom Foundation that support the bill.
A bill analysis shows that, if the bill passes, it could also cost the state an estimated $903,238 in administrative costs (taxpayer money) to recertify unions that fall below the 60% membership threshold imposed by the legislation.
Workers covered by that union could vote to recertify — as Rep. Black pointed out — but why put workers through that process in the first place?
And then, if it’s meant to “strengthen unions,” why are police and firefighters carved out of it, and why don’t labor unions support it?
If it’s meant to “strengthen unions,” why are police and firefighters carved out of it, and why don’t labor unions support it?
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The Florida Senate’s budget proposal for the year has already factored in the cost of the bill’s implementation, adding an extra one million in funding for the state Public Employee Relations Commission, a DeSantis-appointed panel that oversees Florida’s public sector union elections. The budget specifically names SB 256 to justify that allocation.
The bill also imposes financial auditing requirements that even Republican Sen. Joe Gruters has admitted could unduly burden smaller unions with fewer financial resources.
A supervisor secretary for the Nassau County School Board on Tuesday told House lawmakers during public testimony that that requirement alone would “bankrupt” her union.
All Republicans (save Rep. Mooney, whose vote isn't recorded) voted in favor of the bill, which is not dissimilar to similar bills introduced targeting public sector workers in Oklahoma, Oregon, and Utah.
Kentucky’s governor, a Democrat, recently vetoed a bill passed by that state’s legislature that would ban automatic dues deductions to "protect Kentucky's hard-working families." State lawmakers, however, overrided it.
During the vote in the Florida House committee on Tuesday (the bill's last committee stop), Orlando State Rep. Anna Eskamani, who regularly shows up to organized labor actions in support of worker rights, declared, “Absolutely not. I would rather die.”
In front of the full Florida House, the bill will face 84 Republicans, and 35 Democrats.
