Billionaire-backed group fails to oust Florida's largest teachers union in major union election victory
“It wasn't just like, a little win. It was a landslide win against a multi-million dollar funded organization,” said United Teachers of Dade president Karla Hernández-Mats.
An out-of-state group that schemed to oust Florida’s largest local teachers union, the United Teachers of Dade, has suffered a humiliating and resounding defeat.
After waiting nearly a year for a union election, teachers, librarians, school psychologists, and other staff employed Miami-Dade County Public Schools this week overwhelmingly voted in favor of recertifying the United Teachers of Dade as their union, after being forced to undergo a recertification election triggered by an anti-union law enacted last year.
Under the new law, accurately described as “union busting” by critics, all public sector unions — with the exception of law enforcement, correctional officer, and firefighter unions — must maintain a dues-paying membership of 60% of the employees they represent. If they don’t, they must petition the state for a recertification election, or else be automatically decertified. As an added blow, the law also prevents workers from paying their union dues through an automatic paycheck deduction, bucking a decades-old practice that also happened to be the most convenient way to pay and collect dues.
While over three dozen unions have already successfully undergone this recertification election process, the United Teachers of Dade victory was undoubtedly the most high-profile show of strength from the labor movement yet, due to the union being targeted personally by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and the anti-union Freedom Foundation, a group based in Washington that helped write the 2023 law.
“It wasn’t just like a little win,” United Teachers of Dade president Karla Hernández-Mats told me, in response to the victory. “It was a landslide win against a multimillion-dollar funded organization that couldn’t make a dent into what the people of South Florida believe their rights are and what they deserve.”
“It was a landslide win against a multimillion dollar funded organization that couldn’t make a dent into what the people of South Florida believe their rights are and what they deserve.”
Hernández-Mats, a former special education teacher and a Democrat, became public enemy #2 of Gov. DeSantis a couple of years ago when she was chosen as the running mate of Democratic gubernatorial candidate Charlie Crist, who challenged DeSantis in his run for a second term as Governor in 2022.
The Latina union president described the union’s victory this week as “a testament to the collective power” of the teachers and faculty in Miami-Dade Public Schools and proof that, when people organize and understand the importance of solidarity, organized labor can win. “Faculty and staff want their rights, and they’re going to fight back against these fascist laws that are trying to take away their rights and eliminate the front line of public education,” she affirmed.
According to United Teachers of Dade, 83% of teachers and school staff who participated in the election voted in favor of recertifying United Teachers of Dade as their union, while 3% voted for “no union.” Another 14% voted in favor of joining the upstart Miami Dade Education Coalition, a newly-established “union” that is linked to the Freedom Foundation.
Launched just last year, the Miami Dade Education Coalition (MDEC) is led by public school teacher Brent Urbanik, a social studies teacher who has never been a dues-paying union member, according to Hernández-Mats. He also admitted to local media that he had been recruited to challenge United Teachers of Dade by the Freedom Foundation, which describes itself as a “battle tank” intent on “battering the entrenched power of left-wing government union bosses.”
United Teachers of Dade, a labor union first certified back in 1975, is the state’s oldest public sector union, representing roughly 24,000 teachers and school staff in Miami-Dade County’s public school system. According to the American Federation of Teachers, it’s the largest teachers union in the southeastern United States.
The Freedom Foundation, headquartered in Olympia, Washington, is a billionaire-funded group that sends misleading mailers to union members across the United States, urging them to “opt out” of their unions (a strategy that MDEC later adopted, too). The organization, in step with other anti-union groups, has also lobbied to weaken labor laws, as a member of the right-wing State Policy Network, a web of conservative and libertarian groups that has been tied to so-called “yellow unions.” In response to the United Teachers of Dade’s victory this week, the Freedom Foundation admitted in a statement that they knew they were facing an “uphill battle” but maintained that they will continue to “inform public employees about their options” moving forward.
“After years of subpar representation, partisan political activity, and corruption associated with the United Teachers of Dade (UTD), a group of Miami-Dade teachers approached the Freedom Foundation for help in forming an alternative, independent union,” Freedom Foundation spokesperson Maddie Dermon told me over email. “The Miami Dade Education Coalition (MDEC) knew that this would be an uphill battle. Nonetheless, we were proud to stand alongside educators who, like us, understood the value in offering teachers a choice regarding workplace representation.”
Never mind that Urbanik publicly admitted he was recruited by the Freedom Foundation to challenge United Teachers of Dade, and that public employees already had the option to petition the state to decertify their union, even before the adoption of this new law.
According to a rank-and-file teacher and proud unionist represented by United Teachers of Dade that I’ve kept up with, the Miami Dade Education Coalition alienated and annoyed many of the teachers they sought to reach through misleading mailers, “aggressive canvassing,” and an insulting video the group produced that used footage from George Floyd protests to demonize United Teachers of Dade.
Hernández-Mats described one of the Miami Dade Education Coalition’s leaders, Shawn Beightol, as a “disgruntled former union member” who ran for elected positions within the union but “never got the support.”
“Instead of, you know, being a true unionist and trying to work from within, and, you know, creating a better change, he became a traitor,” claimed Hernández-Mats.
According to reporting from Miami Herald, it’s unclear what this will defeat will mean for the new “union” moving forward. While the Freedom Foundation has publicly touted a fighting spirit, Renee Zayas — another Miami Dade Education Coalition leader — admitted fatigue after the union’s victory. “I am done for now,” she told the Herald, describing 14-hour days that involved both her normal work as a teacher plus the work of running an upstart union. According to the Herald, no one from the Miami Dade Education Coalition even showed up for the tally of votes. You know who did? Representatives of the Freedom Foundation.
But it hasn’t been easy for United Teachers of Dade either. The new law, S.B. 256, has already wiped out dozens of other unions across the state — none of them K-12 teachers’ unions — altogether leaving more than 68,000 public employees without union representation and their former union contracts. Not a single one of those workers (with the exception of a few at the Orange County Sheriff’s Office) voted to kick their union out of their workplace by way of an election. All were decertified either due to low membership — less than the 60% threshold now required — or for failing to renew their registration with the state (an annual task that now appears to be more strictly enforced.)
Those that were decertified due to low membership failed to petition the state for a recertification election, leaving workers without a chance to explicitly voice their say. But the process for securing that election isn’t easy either, especially for larger unions like United Teachers of Dade. You need signed, printed cards of support from at least 30 percent of the employees you represent, and you have to file them within 30 days of filing your annual registration renewal paperwork with the state.
When the law was first adopted last October, some union leaders were still trying to figure out their deadline for filing cards, or how to properly comply with other requirements for recertification that led the state Public Employees Relations Commission to, in some cases, blatantly dismiss some of the petitions that unions filed.
“It’s definitely doing what it’s intended to do,” said Hernández, of the new law. “It’s trying to kill us through, you know, a thousand cuts.”
She, like other unionists I’ve spoken to over the last year, admitted the law has affected where the union has had to direct its resources. “It has affected the quality of what we do, but it hasn’t deterred us,” she argued. United Teachers of Dade, for instance, just secured a new collective bargaining agreement earlier this month that includes modest raises and mitigates proposed hikes to health insurance costs, according to Hernández-Mats.
Other unions, while persevering, have similarly struggled with the shift in priorities. Erik Hagen, a music teacher at an elementary school in Hillsborough County, described the situation to me earlier this year as a “nightmare.”
“I shouldn’t be spending all of this time walking around, just trying to get people who were members back to being members,” Hagen told me for In These Times. “I should be spending my time supporting my teachers, building personal connections.”
“It is a hard battle,” Hernández-Mats admitted. “I’m swimming upstream with all my colleagues.” Even so, she said “we’re swimming upstream together.”
Florida Gov. DeSantis, ahead of his unsuccessful bid for U.S. President, prioritized the union-busting law for passage last year, specifically targeting teachers unions. Similar rules, ultimately designed to weaken the power of labor unions or get rid of them completely, has been enacted in similar forms in other states as well, modeled after a template churned out by the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council. But what DeSantis didn’t see coming, according to Hernández-Mats, was “the type of solidarity that it’s built and the way that it’s going to help strengthen our union movement.”
Neither the governor, nor state legislators, similarly predicted the strain this new law would place on the Public Employees Relations Commission, a small, understaffed agency that has just two elections staff. While the state allocated roughly $1 million in taxpayer funds last year specifically to implement the union-busting law, the state didn’t offer more funding to hire more staff, even as the Commission continues to drown in a sea of union elections the new law has forced.
“Workers didn't want it. Workers ever asked for it. And what it’s done is that it has created a system that is burdening our taxpayers,” said Hernández-Mats. “Now, not only does the PERC [Public Employees Relations Commission] need to get more funding so they can be staffed and, you know, work through these elections, but we also know that every time there’s an election, there is an additional cost to every school district.”
After all, the cost of conducting a union election is split between the public employer — for instance, a school district — and the union. “It’s a waste of taxpayer dollars by the state because they’re creating a system that didn't need to exist,” Hernández-Mats continued. “They are backlogged, and unfortunately for them, you know, they’re inefficient because they’re not an elections department. They were not built as a Commission to sustain this.”
And while the victory for United Teachers of Dade is a significant win for the union — and for Florida’s labor movement more broadly for what it signifies — the flip side is that, unless the law changes, or the union manages to exceed the 60% membership threshold, they’ll have to go through this very same process again (potentially without the intervention of the Miami Dade Education Coalition) in just a couple months’ time.
The union filed its petition for recertification almost a year ago — meaning it took nearly a full year for the state to actually conduct their election. Other labor unions that have filed recertification petitions are similarly stuck in this limbo period, too.
The Freedom Foundation did not respond when I asked them whether they plan to lobby the state Legislature for additional reforms to Florida’s union laws next year. But I know from public records I obtained earlier this year that they definitely have ideas. Most of the ideas their lobbyist pitched to the sponsors of last year’s union-busting laws, in collaboration with other anti-union groups, were not taken up by state legislators this spring. But they could, plausibly, be filed for consideration next year, if the group can manage to get lawmakers’ support.