A Florida police union tried and failed to kick 911 dispatchers out of their union following passage of anti-union law
The Florida Public Employees Relations Commission, overseeing public sector labor relations in the state, rejected the effort.
Records show a police union in Pinellas County tried to kick emergency dispatchers out of their union earlier this year, but failed after Florida’s Public Employee Relations Commission — a small, independent state agency — rejected their effort.
According to state documents, the Pinellas Lodge #43 of the Fraternal Order of Police, a union representing more than 700 members in west Central Florida, filed a petition in early March to “sever” dispatchers from one of their bargaining units in the Pinellas County school district, which currently represents the dispatchers, police officers, and investigation clerks.
A decision by the Commission — led by Gov. Ron DeSantis appointees — was finalized in May, dismissing the petition. This dismissal was due in part to the fact that the union’s registration (something they have to renew annually) had expired in 2022. The Commission also wrote, in reference to the dispatchers, that the union had failed to provide evidence that the current unit of employees (dispatchers and all) was “unworkable or otherwise inappropriate.”
“If the Union files a subsequent petition seeking to sever the Dispatchers from the existing unit, the Union should: (1) include factual allegations which, if proven, would satisfy the Commission’s severance standard, and (2) explain why severing the one classification from the current bargaining unit would not result in an overly fragmented unit,” the order reads.
Now, this group of law enforcement employees first voted to unionize with the Pinellas County Lodge #43 in 2018 as part of what appears to have been a raid operation. That is, the dispatchers and investigative clerks, specifically, had previously been represented by the Sun Coast Police Benevolent Association (PBA), a somewhat larger labor union that also represents deputies, lieutenants, and sergeants in the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office. So, a competing labor union of sorts. State records show they’ve had this fight over representation before — in fact, over the representation of Pinellas County sheriff’s deputies, back in 2010. But I digress.
What isn’t made clear in the recent petition, however, is an honest explanation from the Lodge as to why they would want to kick law enforcement employees out of the union.
But I have a guess as to why this is — and, based on a footnote in the Commission’s dismissal, I think they were probably thinking the same thing.
Exempted — or not?
Last year, Florida’s Republican-controlled state legislature and DeSantis approved a highly controversial law essentially designed to undermine public sector unions in the state, with a very special exemption for police, firefighter, and correctional officer unions.
The law (SB 256) bans unions from collecting member dues through payroll deductions, and enacts a mandatory membership threshold, requiring at least 60% of employees eligible for union membership to pay dues, or risk their union being dissolved. It was modeled after similar policies peddled in other states by the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), more than a decade in the making, and was widely framed as an attempt to dismantle the state’s teachers unions.
However, there was a kind of wonky issue with those previously mentioned exemptions, due to how the Commission (in charge of implementing the law) was interpreting it.
Initially, in regards to police unions, the Commission argued that the exemption would only be applied to bargaining units with sworn law enforcement officers. That is, if you have bargaining units that are made up of civilian employees in law enforcement — police dispatchers and 911 operators, for instance — then those units would not be exempted, and would therefore have to follow the new rules like all of the other unions, representing employees in public works, libraries, schools, parks and recreation and the like. How the Commission’s interpretation of the law would apply to mixed units — of civilian employees and sworn officers — was unclear.
Understandably, this interpretation threw police unions for a loop, and angered the Florida Police Benevolent Association in particular. The union filed a complaint against the state Commission last July, arguing the agency’s “apparent disregard” for the “unambiguous” language of the new law threatened to cause “real and sufficiently immediate injury” to the union.
The PBA argued that the exemption in the new law was clearly meant to apply to police and firefighter unions broadly, and not just individual bargaining units. Their legal counsel noted that the exemption in statutes specifically mentioned “bargaining agents,” not units. The Teamsters Local 769, the Florida Professional Firefighters union, and the Fraternal Order of Police joined the PBA’s complaint as “intervenors” in solidarity.
Still, despite the public safety unions’ political clout — as reliable supporters of Republicans for elected office — a state judge dismissed their complaint in October, not really buying the argument.
“The Florida Legislature could have specifically exempted these personnel [civilian employees] by clear and unambiguous language, but chose not to do so,” administrative law judge Robert Cohen in his October 2023 dismissal.
“As essential as these personnel are to the performance of law enforcement and firefighter duties, the PBA and the Intervenors would be well served by approaching the Legislature to clarify or amend chapter 447 [of state statutes] to include such essential personnel in the coming Session,” Cohen added.
As Cohen suggested, that’s exactly what the unions went on to do.
As I first reported for Orlando Weekly, email records I obtained through a public records request show that both police and firefighter unions lobbied the Republican sponsors of the 2023 law to fix their mess. They were joined in this pursuit by the likes of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy and the Freedom Foundation — two conservative, out-of-state think tanks that have an extensive history of lobbying for anti-labor policies on behalf of the billionaires that fund them.
The two bill sponsors — Sen. Blaise Ingoglia (R-Spring Hill) and Rep. Dean Black (R-Jacksonville) — responded to the unions’ pleas for help, and filed legislation (SB 1746) this year that would help alleviate their troubles. The proposal, in part, laid out a clearer exemption for bargaining units where the majority of workers represented are either cops, firefighters, correctional officers, EMTs, paramedics, dispatchers, or 911 operators. So, close to the original, and then some.
Funny enough, Democrats tried to apply a similar exemption last year — an effort that was, at the time, rejected by their Republican colleagues.
The 2024 “glitch bill,” as it was dubbed, cleared the Florida legislature with relative ease, and was signed into law by DeSantis in late March, officially effective March 22, 2024.
This brings us back to the issue in Pinellas County. The petition filed by the Pinellas area Lodge — to cut dispatchers out of their union — was submitted to the state Commission on March 5, just three days ahead of the end of the 2024 legislative session, and just one day before the glitch bill (SB 1746) received its final vote of approval from state lawmakers in the Florida House.
Now, the Lodge could have decided to withdraw its petition to remove the dispatchers from their union either when the bill was passed, when it was signed into law, or presumably — if they follow state politics at all — when they were first made aware that the exemption issue affecting them was going to be solved.
But they didn’t.
The Commission, however, was fully aware of the bill, and what it meant for unions like Lodge #43. Within the Commission’s dismissal of the petition, a footnote meekly states, “The Commission is aware that during the 2024 legislative session, the law changed regarding 911 public safety telecommunicators.”
Super vague note, sure. There’s no further explanation of why such an acknowledgement was relevant to the union’s petition, but one can imagine it is due to a presumed link between the petition and the exemption in the union law that previously didn’t apply to dispatchers.
The new rules for unions that are non-exempted — including the payroll deduction ban and membership threshold — are meant to be arduous and inconvenient, although supporters of them will argue they serve to increase transparency.
The Pinellas County Lodge, for its part, already decided to “disclaim interest” in another one of their bargaining units in December — essentially, a process of voluntarily dissolving the unit.
In fact, as many other labor unions in the state are fighting to survive the new law, at least a dozen other bargaining units represented by police unions have been voluntarily dissolved since the 2023 law fully took effect last October, mostly representing cops in smaller towns and cities, like Belleair Beach and Oak Hill.
That voluntary decertification thing is an odd trend I’ve noticed while digging through the Commission’s absolutely archaic vault of digital records. But, so far, the issue has been unreported, and I haven’t seen discussion of it anywhere either. Perhaps that’s a story for another day.
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