Just three years after enacting the most extreme union repression law in Florida in decades, Florida lawmakers are getting closer to clinching another win for anti-union special interest groups who are closely aligned with Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Trump administration.
The Florida Senate on Friday voted 20-14 to pass Senate Bill 1296, a bill that would effectively make it harder for most local and state government employees to form a union or keep the union they already have. Unions representing law enforcement, firefighters and correctional officers — generally known to back Republicans for office — are, notably, carved out of the proposal.
The bill was approved mostly along party lines, with independent Sen. Jason Pizzo and five Republican senators — Sens. Calatayud, Garcia, Hooper, Rodriguez, and Simon — joining Democrats in opposition. Dozens of public employees, including self-described Republicans, traveled to Tallahassee earlier this week to testify against the proposal, which is sponsored by Sen. Jonathan Martin, R-Fort Myers.
“Every day, I work hard to ensure I provide exceptional care to all my patients and any patient who comes into the Jackson Health system. This bill hurts my ability to do that,” said Casey Mohrien, a resident physician at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami and a member of 1199 SEIU, speaking to the Senate Fiscal Policy Committee. “[It] hurts my ability to advocate for my patients, their families and overall, our communities.”
Lisa Bush, a registered nurse of 25 years at Jackson Memorial who described herself to senators as a “proud Republican,” said she feels this bill doesn’t align with her values. “It is more government, more intrusion, more red tape,” she said.
The bill still needs a final vote of approval in the similarly Republican-dominated Florida House, and is expected to pass this week, even with Democrats standing united in opposition. “I think that we really need to be honest about what Senate Bill 1296 really is,” said Sen. Carlos Guillermo Smith, D-Orlando, speaking on the Senate floor Friday. “This is the next step in a campaign, a years-long campaign to eliminate public sector unions in Florida.”
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Union leaders did not initially expect this bill to get as far as it has — but that was before the legislation was leveraged by Florida’s education commissioner to blame teachers unions for student protests and before the legislation got its own special shout-out from the Trump administration.
“This commonsense reform, SB 1296, reins in fringe political activism from teacher unions and refocuses them on accountability to teachers,” U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon wrote in a post on X last week.
The legislation is backed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, as well as billionaire-funded think tanks that lobby for similar anti-union policies elsewhere, such as the Freedom Foundation (headquartered in Washington State) and the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, which is based out of Michigan. The Florida Chamber of Commerce and the Koch-affiliated Americans for Prosperity group have also endorsed the bill.
“My intention is not to destroy unions,” Martin claimed, when questioned by his Democratic colleagues. “The goal is to get rid of the bad unions.”
“The people who came up here [to testify against the bill] are part of, they’re strong unions,” he added. “They got the message out. They came up here and spoke. They’re going to be fine.”
The 68-page bill changes various parts of Florida statutes concerning public sector unions (as private sector unions are regulated by the federal government). The most deadly provision of the proposal would change voter thresholds in union elections.
Under the bill, a simple majority of at least 50 percent of eligible voters would need to vote to form a union, recertify, or decertify a union, instead of just a majority of those who vote. Essentially, if there are 100 eligible voters, at least 26 must vote in favor of forming, recertifying or decertifying.
This is different from the House version (HB 995), which is identical to the starting version of the Senate bill. Under that version, a majority of the eligible voters would have to vote in favor of unionization or recertification — similar to anti-union laws that already exist in Wisconsin and Iowa. Both of those, passed in 2011 and 2017 respectively, were also backed by influential business groups and opposed by public sector workers themselves.
In addition to changing voter thresholds, Florida’s SB 1296 would also get rid of the option in Florida statutes allowing employers to voluntarily recognize a union of public employees instead of forcing workers to go through an election process when a majority have already demonstrated they want to form a union. It would also significantly increase financial penalties for strikes by public employees, which are already illegal under the Florida Constitution.
“It’s mean-spirited,” Sen. LaVon Bracy Davis, a Democrat from Orlando, stated bluntly. “It sends a really bad message to the working class,” and, she added, it’s “littered with constitutional issues.”
“It sends a really bad message to the working class”
Sen. LaVon Bracy Davis, D-Orlando
A Senate staff analysis of the legislation found several potential constitutionality issues, including the infringement of workers’ collective bargaining rights under the state Constitution. Florida is one of the only states in the U.S. that guarantees the right to collective bargaining in its state constitution.
But Martin, an attorney himself, said he felt confident that previous court decisions scrutinizing similar constitutionality issues demonstrated his bill would hold up, if subjected to a legal challenge.
The bill comes just three years after Florida lawmakers similarly approved a Freedom Foundation-backed union reform bill (SB 256), mostly along party lines. The bill, in short, required more public employees — with the same public safety union carveouts — to pay union membership dues, while simultaneously making it harder for them to do so by banning paycheck dues deductions.
Union members at the time similarly described that change as government overreach and an attack on their right to pay membership dues as they wished.
Within the context of this new proposal, the 2023 law importantly requires unions to go through annual recertification elections if the percentage of workers they represent who pay dues is less than 60 percent. Because paying union dues in Florida is voluntary, this can be a tough threshold to pass. So far, more than 120 bargaining units (groups of workers represented by a union) have been decertified by the state since the law’s passage, stripping union representation from more than 69,000 public employees.
None of these unions decertified, however, have been K-12 teachers unions, which were widely perceived as the target of the law.
“Not one teachers union was decertified. So now, here, we have this bill that is intended to be the kill shot to finish the job,” Sen. Smith pointed out Friday.
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