Florida county will honor parts of a union contract that was voided following the decertification of their employees' union
The Orange County board of commissioners approved a proposal to honor parts of the contract at least through its expiration on Sept. 30, 2025.
A controversial bill signed into law last year by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis targeting public sector unions has so far caused tens of thousands of state and local government employees in the state to lose their union representation, and as a result, their union contracts.
The employees’ bargaining units — groups of workers represented by a local union — were decertified by the state due to non-compliance with new rules under the law. Such rules, in part, banned workers from paying union dues via payroll deduction (the most convenient way for them to do so), and set a minimum threshold for the number of workers who must be dues-paying members (60%) in order for their union to remain certified.
Essentially, the law (S.B. 256) requires more people to pay dues, while also making it harder for them to do so. DeSantis described it as “paycheck protection,” borrowing the language of anti-union groups funded by billionaires. Critics of the law have called it “union-busting.”
Many of the bargaining units that have been decertified as a result of the law so far were first established decades ago, including a labor union first certified in 1976 that represents hundreds of blue-collar employees for the Orange County government, ranging from county electricians to parks workers, janitors, youth resident program workers and traffic signal technicians. Or, it did, until it was decertified by the state this past August.
As a result, the most recent union contract negotiated by their union, the Laborers’ International Union of North America Local 517, was nullified, meaning everything the union had negotiated for Orange County employees over the years, from workplace safety protections to pay raises and grievance procedures, is no longer enforceable.
However, in a recent turn of events, it appears that Orange County officials have committed to honoring at least parts of their current contract, which wasn’t set to expire until Sept. 30, 2025. According to a Board of County Commissioners consent agenda item, approved by commissioners last week, the county has agreed to honor specific provisions of the nullified contract, concerning wages and work completed outside of one’s usual job classification. This means that those scraps of the contract, specifically, will remain in effect, at least through Sept. 30 of next year.
Under their nullified union contract, county employees covered by the union were scheduled to receive a 4% pay raise October 1, with additional pay incentives for workers who hold certain certifications or are promoted. One provision of the contract, which the county will continue to adhere to, also provides annual tool allowances for county mechanics and other trades workers.
According to Orange County director of Human Resources Dr. Yvette Best, the proposal was meant to address discrepancies between the union contract and county policy for non-union employees. Best wrote in a Sept. 18 memo to Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings and county commissioners that the union’s decertification affected “various elements of the impacted employees’ compensation that are not presently addressed by County Policy.”
Best explained that all other aspects of the void contract, including benefits, seniority, working conditions, and other provisions “are no longer in effect and will revert to Count’s policy, provided the policies include similar provisions.”
Similar provisions may be a telling way to describe workplace policy moving forward — especially since county policy, unlike a union contract, can change at any time — but how that will pan out for workers who previously had that union representation is yet to be determined. Still, this move to continue honoring parts of the contract, while not unprecedented, is still notable in that it is something the public employer voluntarily chose to do, and very easily could not have done.
I know this because there are certainly affected public employers who have chosen a different path. For instance, when I reached out the University of Central Florida for comment earlier this year, following the decertification of two of their bargaining units of non-instructional employees in January, the university confirmed to me that they considered the unions’ contract null and void, and left it at that.
Maureen Binder, chief human resources officer for UCF, wrote an email to affected university staff in early February, after I reached out to the university for comment, explaining the situation. “Moving forward you will be guided by the policies and regulations of the university which are designed to uphold the rights and responsibilities of all employees,” Binder wrote to staff, in an email shared with Orlando Weekly. “I encourage you to take a moment to familiarize yourself with these procedures to ensure you are well-informed.”
She explained that the changes shouldn’t affect staff’s day-to-day responsibilities and benefits, and concluded her email with a bizarrely cheery sign-off, inspired by the university’s fight song: “Go Knights, Charge On!”
So there are definitely different ways public employers can approach the situation.
The costs of decertification
One union official, in a conversation about how his union’s holding up, stressed to me in August that this new law has been a problem not only for the unions, but also for the public employers — the local governments, state government, school districts and universities — that also have to navigate the rollout of new rules.
Ronnie Burris, business agent for LiUNA Local 630 in Central Florida, noted the cost of contract negotiations as an example, and what it means when a contract is gone.
He estimated employers likely spend thousands of dollars each time they negotiate new union contracts, factoring in the cost of legal counsel and the working hours of employer-side staff during bargaining meetings. Burris’ own LiUNA local has lost a dozen bargaining units as a result of the law, including bargaining units of city employees in Melbourne, Jacksonville Beach, and in Alachua and Brevard Counties.
“Look at all the money that was spent to negotiate a contract that went away,” said Burris, who’s based in Jacksonville.
What’s yet to be seen is how this will affect the workforce and the rights afforded to them in the workplace moving forward. Collective bargaining rights for public employees, and the process of contract negotiations, gives workers the ability to advocate for improvements to pay and working conditions as a collective, where they have greater power in numbers. While an employer may claim to be a good boss, and receptive to employees’ needs without a union, there are certainly gains that public employees have achieved through collective bargaining over the years that their employer initially resisted. Some public employers have even spent thousands of dollars ahead of union elections on third-party ‘union avoidance’ attorneys in an effort to dwindle support for unionization and kill support for the union ahead of the vote.
According to the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think-tank, collective bargaining for public employees has historically shown to help reduce the wage gap between public and private sector workers. This is an issue that disproportionately affects women and racial minorities, who are more likely to be employed in the public sector, and factors into other problems, such as staffing shortages. Furthermore, decades of data has shown that public sector unions can have positive spillover effects for nonunion public employees, too, and to an extent raise standards for workers, particularly women, in the private sector as well.
The Orange County teachers’ union for its part, in Central Florida, is currently fighting their school district for breastfeeding accommodations for nursing educators that they are legally entitled to under federal law. According to union president Clinton McCracken, the county superintendent also rejected language the union proposed last year to address heat in classrooms caused by broken or malfunctioning AC (a problem that reportedly sent several students to the hospital last month). The district last year also fought the union’s attempt to deliver percentage wage increases, as opposed to a fixed-dollar increase, which the union eventually won.
‘We’re still here’
The impact of S.B. 256 — a law celebrated by anti-union special interest groups — has been confusing for everyone. According to Mainstreet Daily News, the Gainesville Regional Utilities Authority in August sent a letter to its employees, falsely informing them that their union had been decertified.
Their union, affiliated with the Communications Workers of America, had not in fact been formally decertified. The employer reportedly sent a follow-up email the following week somewhat clarifying the situation.
“We’re still here,” union organizer Jen Powell told the Mainstreet Daily News, describing the initial letter as ridiculous. “We’re not going anywhere. We’ve moved on to the second step.”
That next step for that union and dozens of others is a recertification election — another cost to consider, by way of stamps and the cost of mail ballots, that is split between the union and the employer. See, under Florida law, each year unions have to renew their registration with the state, a process that involves sharing membership numbers.
Under S.B. 256, if a union now reports to the state that they have less than 60% membership density in a bargaining unit, the union is faced with two options: They can grimly accept that the bargaining unit is going to be decertified, based on factors such as membership density and the motivation that exists among workers to keep the union alive, or they can petition the state for what’s known as a recertification election.
Doing so requires gathered signed cards of support from at least 30% of workers — a tall ask if workers are spread out across a municipality or the state. Even more, workers can’t sign these authorization cards digitally. It all has to be done in print, and cards are counted by Public Employee Relations Commission staff manually.
In the case of some larger bargaining units, that’s literally thousands of cards, and according to a state database, the Commission only has two elections staff. While the state tossed the agency a $1 million boost in funds last fiscal year specifically to implement S.B. 256, multiple labor-side folks I’ve talked to have said the burden on PERC is a major problem.
Burris told me the agency even had to shut down its office one day, just to count cards signed by city of Jacksonville employees and to ensure the cards were filled out correctly.
A former wastewater operator of 25 years, Burris sees the burden this new state law has had on public employers, and on the understaffed state agency tasked with implementing the law, as problems that Florida legislators just didn’t consider. “What it cost to taxpayers, what it cost the municipalities…what it’s done to PERC [Public Employees Relations Commission], none of that was figured,” he said. “All they wanted to do was get rid of, try to get rid of as many unions as they could.”
The law, which controversially exempts bargaining units of law enforcement officers, firefighters and correctional officers, was first drafted more than a decade ago in collaboration with right-wing think tanks affiliated with the American Legislative Exchange Council, an anti-union bill mill notorious for sending model policy templates to state legislators across the country. The anti-union S.B. 256 in Florida has been altered some since a version of it was first proposed in the Florida Legislature in 2011, and was prioritized by Gov. DeSantis in 2023 ahead of his failed campaign for U.S. President.
The target of the bill was Florida’s teachers unions, which make up the bulk of Florida’s unionized public sector, and are regularly targeted by right-wing interests that are more concerned about alleged “indoctrination” in classrooms and books about gay penguins in school libraries than supporting a strong public education system that can effectively serve students and families of all income levels, racial and ethnic backgrounds, and abilities.
The statewide teachers union, the Florida Education Association, also endorsed DeSantis’ Democratic challenger, Charlie Crist, for Florida Governor in 2022, along with Crist’s running mate Karla Hernandez-Matz, the president of Florida’s largest local teachers union.
Prior to the bill’s passage, teachers unions in Florida, specifically, were held to a minimum membership threshold of 50%, under a 2018 mandate signed into law by former Gov. Rick Scott. The 2023 bill raised that to 60% not just for teachers unions, but all other public sector unions, too, which have in effect become collateral damage.
“This bill is very wrong, all the way around, and they [state legislators] didn’t think about it,” argued Burris. “All he [DeSantis] thought about was being President of the United States.”
And we saw how that went.