A plaque on a wall of the IBEW Local 606 union hall in Orlando, Florida. Credit: McKenna Schueler

A group of blue-collar city workers employed by the city of Titusville on Florida’s Space Coast voted 79 to 12 in late April to form a new union with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 606, after seeing their former union decertified by the state last year.

According to the Talk of Titusville, a local news site, morale in the city’s public works workforce has been low, driving vacancies in the department. Proposals from their new union, however, aim to help address some employee grievances. The union reportedly is seeking a 6 percent wage increase, a 6 percent cost-of-living increase and inclusion in the city’s 401(k) retirement plan.

Todd Provost, the union’s business manager, declined to comment for this story, citing upcoming contract negotiations that he didn’t wish to disturb. He previously told Orlando Weekly, after the workers first began organizing with the IBEW last year, that unionizing “gives them a voice without the fear of retaliation.”

“Everyone deserves the right to be represented by somebody to fight for them.”
Todd Provost, an IBEW Local 606 union official

His union, based in Orlando, represents nearly 2,000 workers, including electrical maintenance workers at Disney World.

“I don’t care if it’s a Disney cast member, if it’s a construction worker, if it’s a public employee — everyone deserves the right to be represented by somebody to fight for them,” Provost said.

Union representation is associated with higher average earnings and access to stronger job benefits, including retirement benefits, paid leave and just-cause protections that can protect workers from being fired for no justifiable reason. In this economy, the ability to hold onto your job matters.

Despite efforts by Florida Republican lawmakers to undermine unions in Florida’s public sector, federal data shows that public sector workers are more likely to be unionized, compared to their private sector counterparts. Twenty-seven percent of Florida’s public sector is unionized, for instance, compared to just 3.4 percent of the state’s private sector.

A national assault on public sector unions

Nationally, the public sector generally has a higher union density. Even the Trump administration’s attempt to strip more than a million federal employees of their collective bargaining rights hasn’t (yet) hampered this.

“The second Trump administration launched the most vicious attack on public sector union workers since the Reagan era,” Hayley Brown, a researcher at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, told The Guardian in a statement. “While the assault’s full effect remains to be seen, the numbers from 2025 leave room for cautious optimism.”

Public sector unions have been targeted by Republicans for elimination, on both a state and national level, to reduce government “waste,” give workers the “freedom” to have less of a voice on the job and to get “woke” out of government — as several prominent unions have, at least in recent history, supported worker protections for marginalized groups of workers, including immigrants and LGBTQ+ workers.

A Sunshine State-specific battle

Florida’s public sector, however — specifically employees of the state and local governments — has faced its own assault on unions.

The newly unionized workers in Titusville — including city electricians, public works technicians and utility maintenance workers — are one of the first groups of workers to reorganize a union since a state law passed in 2023 killed off more than 100 unions in Florida and counting.

The Titusville group had previously been represented by the Laborers International Union of America after voting to form a union with LiUNA Local 630 in 1976, shortly after Florida’s public sector was first granted clear collective bargaining rights under state law.

Decades later, a new union reform law (SB 256) — backed by billionaire-funded think tanks that oppose unions — passed the Florida Legislature in 2023. It implemented new rules for most public employee unions, with exceptions for public safety unions representing cops, firefighters and correctional officers.

The law required at least 60 percent of workers represented by a union to pay union membership dues — doing so is voluntary under the Florida Constitution — while simultaneously banning the most convenient way for workers to do so: through a payroll deduction.

Some major unions in the state found the rules a logistical nightmare to navigate, including LIUNA Local 630. The former union of Titusville city workers in 2024 was found to be non-compliant by the state agency that regulates public sector unions, the Public Employees Relations Commission.

It found that fewer than 60 percent of workers in the bargaining unit (a group of workers represented by a union) paid dues. And while the law allows unions to file petitions with the state for a recertification election, under such circumstances, LIUNA Local 630 did not do so. The state labor relations agency — led by appointees of Gov. Ron DeSantis — consequently decertified, or essentially dissolved the union, as a result.

“LIUNA has felt the impact of this law in Florida and we are not going to pretend otherwise,” said Ronnie Burris, business manager for LIUNA Local 630, in a statement. “But we are also not standing still. We are organizing, building membership and fighting to ensure the workers we represent understand what is at stake,” he added. “The answer to a law designed to silence workers is not to retreat. It is to organize harder.”

Burris’s union represents a wide range of workers in northeast and Central Florida, including Orlando city employees, wastewater workers, code enforcement officers, and other public employees who help keep communities running. Florida’s SB 256, he says, “was a political calculation, and Florida’s working families are paying the price for it.”

A broader mission

Florida is, notably, one of just a half-dozen states in the U.S. that guarantees collective bargaining rights in its state Constitution. Union advocates, however, argue that this key protection is under attack.

“The Florida Legislature and their billionaire backers are trying to eliminate the rights of public sector workers to organize and collectively bargain,” Rich Templin, director of politics and public policy for the Florida AFL-CIO, told Orlando Weekly of the challenges unions face more broadly. “The only reason they haven’t wiped it out completely is because it’s protected in Article 1, Section 6 of the State Constitution,” he added.

Altering the state Constitution requires a say from voters at the ballot box — meaning, it can’t be changed unilaterally by state politicians.

According to Templin, however, the state Legislature has essentially sought to gut collective bargaining rights in what he describes as “death by a thousand paper cuts.” The Florida AFL-CIO is a federation of more than 500 labor unions across the state, representing more than 1 million private and public sector union members and retirees.

“It’s just to stop people from exercising a basic constitutional right and fighting for a better life,” he said of the efforts to undermine the state’s unions.

Future barriers

The newly unionized Titusville employees and other public employees across the state, however, will see more difficult barriers to retaining their union representation as a result of a new policy approved by Florida legislators and Gov. DeSantis this year.

The bill, SB 1296, sets higher standards for union elections, including elections to form, recertify, or even decertify unions. While Florida law previously just required a majority of those who vote in an election to vote in favor of unionization, the new law — effectively July 1 — will also require a voter turnout of at least 50 percent.

Dozens of public employees, including self-described Republican union members, traveled to Tallahassee to speak against the proposal, to no avail.

“Creating that ridiculous vote hurdle, you know, that has also been percolating in other states, so a lot of our local unions have been kind of preparing for it,” Templin said. Similar voter turnout requirements have also been enacted in Wisconsin and Iowa.

“I think you’re going to see a lot more locals [unions] decertified,” Templin admitted. “But I think you’re going to see a hell of a lot of organizing, and all of those unions, you know, coming back under this new ridiculous rule.”

Public support for unions in the U.S. remains high, despite hostility toward unions from the federal administration (after the comparatively pro-union leadership of President Joe Biden). And while Florida’s 2023 law did see the elimination of union representation for more than 69,000 mostly state employees, according to data tracking by the Weekly, tens of thousands more have voted in favor of keeping their unions alive.

Teachers unions — the perceived target of Florida’s anti-union policies — have proven particularly resilient.

“Nearly two years after a law that sought to destroy a worker’s right to have a union and millions of dollars spent by out-of-state, fringe, anti-worker groups, educators are standing firm and proudly voting to keep their local unions,” Andrew Spar, president of the Florida Education Association, a statewide teachers union, said in a statement last year.

Teachers unions have butted heads with the DeSantis administration over budgets for public education, teacher salaries, the preservation of academic freedom in classrooms, and the state’s increased investment in student vouchers for private schools that are far less regulated than public schools and can legally discriminate against students as a result.

“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,” the Florida Education Association said in a statement after SB 1296 was signed into law.

“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.”

At least 10 groups of workers, including the city of Titusville employees, have voted to form new unions since the 2023 law took effect.

This includes blue-collar workers in the Volusia County school district — who reorganized with the local teachers union — city employees in Daytona Beach, public utility workers in Lake Worth Beach, and former University of South Florida employees who saw their jobs privatized by the university shortly after their first union was decertified by the state.

“Hopefully in the future, future legislators, you know — when this governor is out of office — they can see the error of their ways and eliminate all of the barriers that they’ve erected,” said Templin.

As for LIUNA Local 630, Burris is remaining optimistic, despite its challenges. “LIUNA members have been building and maintaining this state for generations. They are not going anywhere,” he argued. “We will continue to fight for their right to organize, bargain collectively, and have a voice in the conditions of their work regardless of what any politician signs into law.”

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