Florida lawmakers passed legislation this week that could provide a deadly blow to many of the state’s public sector unions, just three years after the enactment of another significant union repression law.
The legislation (HB 995/SB 1296), likely to be approved by Gov. Ron DeSantis, changes union election rules, guts voluntary recognition rights for most public employees, and increases financial penalties for public employee strikes.
Now, emails obtained by Orlando Weekly through a public records request show that a right-wing think tank, based out of state, was prepared with materials to help ensure its passage.
Records show the Freedom Foundation — a “free market” think tank headquartered in Washington — emailed talking points for the Florida legislation to its Republican House bill sponsor, Rep. Jenna Persons-Mulicka, just one day ahead of its first committee hearing in late January. Metadata show the document was created by Maxford Nelsen, the Freedom Foundation’s director of research and government affairs.
“Here are some talking points on the three provisions that we care about, as well as the one pager we are using to lobby in favor of the bill,” wrote Christian Cámara, a lobbyist for the Freedom Foundation, in a Jan. 28 email to Persons-Mulicka’s aide.
The talking points emphasize that the bill “would make government unions more accountable to both taxpayers and the public employees they represent.”
But accountability isn’t their only goal. The Freedom Foundation openly states on its website that the group sees government unions as “a root cause of every growing national dysfunction in America.” And the Freedom Foundation calls itself a “battle tank … battering the entrenched power of left-wing government union bosses.”
Records previously obtained by Orlando Weekly show the Freedom Foundation has been pushing additional reforms to Florida’s union-related statutes since 2023 through a collaboration with the Mackinac Center for Public Policy — another right-wing think tank based in Michigan — and later, with the help of the governor’s office.
Rep. Persons-Mulicka did not respond to a request for comment from Orlando Weekly on her collaboration with the Freedom Foundation ahead of publication.
Dr. Rich Templin, a longtime political director and lobbyist for the Florida AFL-CIO, said he believes the email exchange with the Freedom Foundation just offers more proof that these anti-union bills making their way through the Florida Legislature are a solution looking for a problem.
“It is, once again, proof positive that none of this — none of this — has anything to do with Florida,” Templin told Orlando Weekly Wednesday, shortly ahead of the bill’s passage in the Florida House.
“Consistently, since this legislation first started showing up in 2011, the public employers have not asked for it. The public employees have not asked for it. Nobody in Florida has asked for this legislation,” Templin said. His organization is the state’s largest federation of labor unions, representing more than a million workers and retirees.
Entering the ‘no-right-to-exist’ era
A controversial 2023 Florida law also opposed by the Florida AFL-CIO — and backed by the Freedom Foundation — was the first, major successful attempt in decades to undermine unions representing most of the state’s local and state government employees.
It was based on a 2011 anti-union law enacted in Wisconsin, later introduced in a similar form in Florida. And it took 12 years for it to finally pass.
By that time, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — who sparred with teachers unions over precautions during the COVID-19 pandemic — was in the executive office.
“Florida has become a billionaires’ playground. If you’ve got billions of dollars and a think tank and you just want to have some fun with public policy that impacts hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people in some cases, you come to Florida,” said Templin. “And it was Ron DeSantis who set the table and invited everybody to dinner.”
“Florida has become a billionaires’ playground.”
Dr. Rich Templin, political director for the Florida AFL-CIO
The 2023 law in Florida, like the one in Wisconsin, eliminated the option for most public employees to pay union dues through a paycheck deduction — the most common way for them to do so. While removing that simple means of payment, it also required more members to pay dues.
Under the law, public sector unions with a dues-paying membership of fewer than 60 percent of the workers they represent are forced to petition for recertification elections annually. Police and firefighter unions (which generally support Republicans for office) are exempted.
Since paying union dues is already voluntary under Florida’s right to work policy, reaching that 60 percent threshold — when you can still benefit from union representation without paying for it — can be a tough ask. Florida has become increasingly unaffordable for middle-class families, and public sector workers generally earn less than what they could earn doing similar work in the private sector.
Since early 2024, state records show at least 123 public employee unions have been decertified (effectively dissolved) by the state Public Employees Relations Commission as a result of the new rules, gutting union representation and eliminating union contracts for more than 69,000 workers.
Hundreds of maintenance, utility and other blue-collar workers at the University of South Florida in Tampa, for instance — who first unionized in 2004 — saw their jobs privatized after their union was dissolved in early 2024. All of the state’s adjunct faculty unions, formerly affiliated with the faculty arm of the Services Employees International Union, are also gone.
Most of the unions decertified so far haven’t been decertified due to members voting the union out, but rather because the union didn’t petition the state for a union election. That’s a step that’s necessary to prevent the state from automatically dissolving a union with less than 60 percent membership.
After the 2023 law was passed, many unions scrambled to figure out how to comply with the law and prevent this from happening. More than 100 didn’t succeed.
More than 69,000 public employees have lost their union representation and union contracts since 2023
Teachers unions, however — the perceived target of the law — have mostly survived the 2023 law’s new requirements. Thousands of teachers, full-time university and college faculty, and other school staff represented by the Florida Education Association have overwhelmingly voted in favor of keeping their unions since its passage. They haven’t lost a local union yet.
FEA president Andrew Spar, a former music teacher, believes this year’s bill is the Freedom Foundation’s latest attempt to get rid of them.
“In 2023, the Freedom Foundation tried to go after teachers’ unions—and failed. Now they are pushing SB 1296/HB 995, bills they helped write, in yet another attempt to make it harder for workers, including educators, to fight for a better life,” Spar told Orlando Weekly in a statement.
Indeed, this new legislation would go a step further than the 2023 law, in what Florida professors Robert Cassanello and Katie Rainwater (both union members) recently described as the “no-right-to-exist” era for Florida’s unions.
Under this year’s legislation, most public employees will face a steeper threshold to either form, recertify or decertify their union — with carve-outs maintained for unions representing “public safety” workers such as police and firefighters.
It’s been altered a few times.
The initial proposal, as filed, would have required a simple majority of eligible voters (51 percent) to vote in favor of unionization, instead of just a majority of workers who vote.
An amended version, approved by both the House and Senate chambers, would require at least 51 percent of workers to vote in favor in an election that sees at least 50 percent voter turnout — signifying a form of harm reduction for unions.
Essentially, if there are 100 workers trying to form a union, at least 26 would have to vote in favor of unionization for the union to prevail under the bill passed. Under the original version, 51 workers would have had to.
Supporters of the bill argued the change from current law was necessary to ensure the union is sufficiently supported by a majority of the workers it represents.
“We have example after example where a bargaining unit represents hundreds or thousands of employees and only a handful show up and vote, and vote in favor of continuing the union,” Rep. Persons-Mulicka, argued Wednesday on the House floor. “That is a problem, and that is the problem that we are now seeking to solve with this legislation.”
She cited three examples of recent union recertification elections involving graduate assistant workers, Broward County employees and University of South Florida faculty, where voter turnout was below 5 percent.
All three examples were highlighted in an “one-pager” drafted by the Freedom Foundation, according to public records obtained by the Weekly. Cámara, the Freedom Foundation lobbyist, emailed this one-pager to Persons-Mulicka’s office ahead of her bill’s first hearing in January.
“In preparation for tomorrow’s committee hearing, I wanted to provide Rep. Persons-Mulicka with some information regarding public sector union elections held recently,” Cámara wrote. The one-pager, he explained, would provide “the most extreme examples” of cases where union elections “have been decided by a tiny minority of employees rather than from broad input or consensus.”
Persons-Mulicka’s legislative aide quickly responded, “Thank you Christian!” just 10 minutes later. Then, shortly after, “Also sending to Martin’s staff,” she wrote, likely referring to Sen. Jonathan Martin, R-Fort Myers, who sponsored the legislation in the Senate.
“Cool thanks! I just sent it to them too, so that should be good,” Cámara replied.
The legislation, notably, would also get rid of voluntary recognition as an option for public employees seeking to form a union (instead of going through an election process). It would also increase the financial penalties for strikes by public employees from $20,000 per day to $40,000.
Public sector strikes are already illegal under the state Constitution, and as far as our reporter is aware, there hasn’t been a strike by local or state government workers in Florida in decades.
Notably, Persons-Mulicka’s bill — sponsored by Republican Sen. Jonathan Martin in the Senate — gained the backing of Florida’s education commissioner, a known ally of the Freedom Foundation and its spinoff association, the Teachers Freedom Alliance. Gov. DeSantis and the Trump administration also expressed their support.
“I commend @GovRonDeSantis and the Florida leaders working to ensure unions truly have the support of the educators they represent,” wrote U.S. Department of Education secretary Linda McMahon, in a post on X. “This commonsense reform, SB 1296, reins in fringe political activism from teacher unions and refocuses them on accountability to teachers.”
War on teachers unions
While teachers unions have been framed as the target of the bill — as a frequent punching bag of the political right — other public employees, such as school bus drivers, traffic safety technicians, custodial workers and healthcare workers, would also be affected.
More than 150 public employees, including self-described Republicans, traveled up to Tallahassee to speak against the bill, according to the Florida Phoenix.
“As a Republican, I believe passing this bill will be detrimental to our entire family and workers across the state,” said Ellery Farmer, a retired firefighter from Polk County who testified against the bill during a hearing in the Senate. Lisa Bush, a nurse of 25 years at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami, said the bill just offers “more intrusion” and “more red tape.” She described herself to senators as a “proud Republican.”
About 27 percent of Florida’s public sector is unionized, according to federal data, compared to just 3.4 percent of the state’s private sector workforce. Unlike local and state government unions, however, private sector unions are regulated by federal labor authorities.
Freedom Foundation lobbyist Rusty Brown, a former “union avoidance” consultant and former policy advisor in the U.S. Department of Labor under the first Trump administration, admitted to a panel of Florida senators this month that his group’s goal is to reduce or eliminate public sector unions in Florida.
He wasn’t shy about it when pressed.
The Freedom Foundation, founded in 1992 as the Evergreen Freedom Foundation, is an affiliate of the corporate-funded State Policy Network, a sister organization to the American Legislative Exchange Council. It’s received hundreds of thousands of dollars in the past from billionaire-funded groups such as the Adolph Coors Foundation, the Bradley Foundation, the Ed Uihlein Family Foundation and the Charles Koch Foundation.
They’ve also pushed for anti-union reforms in other states as well, most recently in Idaho.
The final step
Democrats in the Florida Legislature uniformly voted against the Florida bill in both the House and Senate. But they’re outnumbered by Republicans more than 2 to 1. Eight Republicans in the House joined Democrats in opposition to the bill in a 73-37 vote, while five Republicans did so through a 20-14 vote in the state Senate.
“As part of a union I understood the benefits that came with representation,” said Republican Sen. Corey Simon, a former NBA basketball player, during a Senate hearing on the bill earlier this month. “I understood the process of how the team wasn’t looking out for the player.”
Simon was one of the five Republican senators who voted no, joined by GOP Sens. Alexis Calatayud, Ileana Garcia, Ed Hooper and Ana Maria Rodriguez.
Democrats, meanwhile, pointed out constitutionality issues flagged by a Senate staff analysis of the legislation, which noted the bill could infringe on Florida workers’ collective bargaining rights under the state Constitution, in addition to equal protection and free speech rights.
“This bill undermines those freedoms — constitutionally protected freedoms — simply because there are powerful outsiders, outside interests, who do not like the outcome when union workers vote,” said Sen. Carlos Guillermo-Smith, D-Orlando, speaking on the Senate floor.
Sen. LaVon Bracy Davis, D-Ocoee, described the bill as an “unconstitutional trainwreck” and “mean-spirited.”
The bill now heads to the desk of Gov. DeSantis for final approval.
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