Is there hope on the horizon for Florida's public sector unions?

Dozens of local unions have been dissolved due to new regulations imposed by the state last year. Members of one, however, just voted to bring theirs back.

When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law a controversial bill last year designed to undercut the state’s public employee unions, the target of the legislation was clear. While it was described by its GOP supporters as “pro-employee,” and an effort to increase transparency, Florida’s S.B. 256 was plainly intended to undermine the state’s education unions, a shared enemy of the pro-privatization right-wing that DeSantis was hoping to garner support from ahead of his unsuccessful campaign for U.S. President this year.

“For far too long, unions and rogue school boards have pushed around our teachers, misused government funds for political purposes, taken money from teachers’ pockets to steer it for purposes other than representation of teachers, and sheltered their true political goals from the educators they purport to represent,” DeSantis claimed in a statement after signing the bill into law.

The law, similar to others enacted in states like Kentucky and Arkansas, does a few things. S.B. 256 prohibits state and local government employees from paying union dues through an automatic paycheck deduction, a decades-old practice that also just happens to be the most convenient way to pay dues. It also requires at least 60 percent of workers that a union represents to be dues-paying members in order for the union to remain certified. Under Florida’s right-to-work law, established in 1944, no worker can be compelled to join a union. Becoming a full, dues-paying union member in Florida is completely voluntary.

No union in Florida, save for the teachers unions, had been subject to any kind of membership threshold in Florida before. Under a 2018 law approved by former Gov. Rick Scott, unions representing K-12 educators, specifically, were held to a 50 percent membership threshold — a difficult bar to reach when non-members can reap the same benefits as those who choose to voluntarily pay dues. DeSantis’ call for the Florida Legislature last year to establish or otherwise raise the bar to 60 percent was seen by union leaders as pointed.

“We, as educators in Florida, exercise our constitutional rights, and for doing so we have faced political retribution by the governor of this great state,” said Andrew Spar, president of the Florida Education Association, in a statement announcing a lawsuit over the law last May.

What DeSantis did not convey, or acknowledge in his statements on S.B. 256 was the rest of the public sector that would become collateral damage: hard-working local and state government workers who clear the roadways after major storms, collect trash, staff public libraries, drive kids to school and answer emergency 911 calls.

Notably exempted from the law, however, were bargaining units of firefighters, sworn police officers, and correctional officers who belong to unions that have endorsed DeSantis for elected office. They were deemed a “special class” of employees. After union leaders warned the law could risk hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funds for local public transit systems, unions representing mass transit workers were offered the chance to seek waivers, too.

It’s been nearly a year since the law fully took effect, and so far, not a single teachers union targeted by the DeSantis administration has been dissolved. Instead, over 90 other bargaining units, representing state and local government workers have, rendering the rights and benefits they received under their union contracts — such as negotiated raises, workplace safety protections, and paid time off — null and void.

Altogether, more than 68,000 workers in Florida — Democrat, Republican, and Independents alike — have lost their union representation (and their contracts) since the law took effect. Several of these unions were first organized decades ago, back when it first became legal for them to do so, and it’s unclear how the state and various municipalities will handle labor relations moving forward.

Ronnie Burris, business agent for the Laborers International Union of North America (LiUNA) Local 630 in Jacksonville, highlighted the grievance process as a clear example of what unionized workers stand to lose. “If there's an issue, whatever that issue may be, then the employees have a right to bring that to the union and to file a grievance on it, and then we can go to arbitration,” Burris told me. “They’re afforded all those rights. Without the union, they’re not afforded anything.”

His local, based in Jacksonville, has lost nearly a dozen bargaining units, representing thousands of employees, as a result of the law.

On the road to recovery?

Earlier this month, however, marked a small, but notable sign of recovery for Florida’s unionized public sector.

Nearly 2,000 city employees in the city of Jacksonville, formerly represented by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), became the first group of workers since the passage of S.B. 256 to reconstruct their 20-year-old union after it was officially decertified by the state.

According to the union, the group of city employees voted 223-53 in favor of re-establishing their union earlier this month. Admittedly, the vast majority of eligible voters — 1,558 workers — sat the recent election out. Of those who voted, however, a resounding 81 percent voted in favor of the union.

“We are already working hard with leaders across departments to rebuild this proud union after the delay in holding this election caused their certification to expire and uncertainty to spread,” AFSCME Florida administrator James Spears, Jr. said in a statement. “But let me be clear, AFSCME members were never going anyway because we never quit, we fight for our rights and our union because that is what we deserve.”

It took eight months for them to rebuild their union and officially vote it back into existence. Presumably, that’s due to a significant backlog currently affecting the Public Employees Relations Commmission (PERC), a small and understaffed state agency tasked with carrying out the implementation of S.B. 256.

Most of the unions decertified by the state Commission so far, including the one in Jacksonville, were dissolved not because workers voted to get rid of their unions, but because they didn’t have the chance to.

Altogether, more than 68,000 workers in Florida have lost their union representation and contractual protections since the law took effect.

All unions, by law, are required to new their registration with the state annually, a process that requires reporting the number of employees they represent and who pay dues. The deadline for doing so coincides with when they were first registered as a labor union by by state, which varies from one union to the next. The deadline for AFSCME Council 79, covering AFSCME locals in Florida, came around in late October, meaning they were forced to reckon with the new law’s changes (fully effective Oct. 1) earlier than most.

Since then, other bargaining units affiliated with the Teamsters, LiUNA, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) — formerly representing all eight of the state’s now-defunct adjunct faculty unions — and others have similarly been decertified, including bargaining units of supervisory employees in Jacksonville, formerly represented by the Jacksonville Supervisors Association.

All but one of the labor unions that have been dissolved by the state so far have been dissolved due to low membership, or for failing to file their annual registration renewal paperwork. See, if a union now has a membership density lower than 60 percent, the union has two options: They can petition the state for a recertification election, a process that requires gathering signed, printed cards from at least 30 percent of employees in favor of keeping their union. They can’t be collected or filled out digitally.

If the union fails to gather these cards, and have employees fill them out correctly, the union is decertified. Under the new law, a union has to file these cards of support from workers within 30 days of submitting their membership information.

With employees spread across a city, county, or even the entire state, gathering those signed cards is a tall ask. Some labor unions dispatched temporary organizers to Florida from out-of-state to help local unions gather cards. Others didn’t have the time, resources, or guidance they needed from the state to beat the clock.

A spokesperson for AFSCME told me that city workers in Jacksonville had begun gathering signed cards of support for a recertification election early on, prior to their union’s unexpected dissolution in January. Guidance from the state on how to do this in a timely manner, and thus remain in compliance with the law, however, was unclear — and the union had its certification revoked by the Commission, anyway.

Other unions, including other AFSCME units, secured enough dues-paying members to meet the 60 percent threshold, or eventually figured out the process but now remain in something of a limbo state. According to state records, over 300 bargaining units in Florida have filed petitions for recertification elections, but most are still awaiting election dates. If membership remains low, below 60 percent, they could very well have to go through the same process in less than a year’s time.

Union leaders have observed the impact of this law on the Commission, and have highlighted this in an effort to frame this not as just a ‘union’ problem, but one that could reasonably affect non-union taxpayers, too.

The state Commission — which got a $1 million boost in funds from the state this year specifically to implement S.B. 256 — has literally just two election staff to handle recertification elections for those below 60 percent. And all ballots must be handled manually, for whatever reason.

Burris told me he doesn’t think state lawmakers were fully aware of, or prepared to face the chaos that S.B. 256 has created. “They didn't think about the Public Employee Relations Commission. In Tallahassee, the Governor — when this bill was passed, he gave them enough money to hire one person.”

“They went from 40 to over 200 elections a year,” said Burris. “So that wasn’t considered. There was no money put in the budget for that.”

Burris says the law is or certainly will cost the state, municipalities — and by extension — the general public, too. “It’s been a nightmare,” he said.

Florida’s S.B. 256 was a law years in the making that was based off a model policy from the American Legislative Exchange Council, a national right-wing network of billionaire-funded think-tanks with a vested interest in weakening the power of organized labor. A couple of those think-tanks have even taken credit for helping to draft S.B. 256, including the Olympia, Washington-based Freedom Foundation — which is currently on a mission to oust the state’s largest teachers union — and the Center for Independent Employees, a group headed by anti-union labor consultant (a.k.a. “union buster”) Russell “Russ” Brown of Satellite Beach.

Think-tanks, in addition to public safety unions, also lobbied for minor changes to the law this year. These changes, made through S.B. 1746, carved out additional civilian employee represented by law enforcement and firefighter unions (such as paramedics), while further complicating rules for non-exempted unions. Little relief was provided for everyone else, despite pleas from labor advocates.

Just the beginning

These city employees in Jacksonville may be the first to re-organize their union following decertification, but I don’t expect they will be the last.

In recent months, I’ve heard from a longtime member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (we’re talking 30+ years) who’s working with his coworkers to re-establish his union of utility workers in Lake Worth Beach, near Donald Trump’s stomping grounds.

Andrew Spar, president of the Florida Education Association — the parent of most of the state’s local teachers unions — told me this spring that the FEA has also been contacted by other school district employees who lost their unions and want to re-organize under the FEA umbrella.

Spar politely declined to clarify where this was occurring, since the process of re-organizing was still in its early stages and they weren’t ready to go public.

But he was adamant that the dissolution of their unions wasn’t a choice freely made. “It’s not that they don’t want union representation,” Spar told me. He said it’s an issue of the available resources and capacity that unions have “to jump through the number of hoops that have been put in place” with the intent of “destroying the unions, and the voice of people who work in the state of Florida.”

Because the FEA is affiliated with the AFL-CIO, which has a strict no-raid policy (i.e. don’t try to steal union members from other AFL-CIO affiliates), the FEA has had to ask permission in order to accept these workers into their ranks, who were formerly affiliated with another union. I’ve been keeping an eye out for election filings that match this phenomenon Spar has described — and will keep you posted if I see this materialize.

Some labor advocates in Florida, including Spar, have optimistically shared that the labor movement is beginning to rebuild itself, that the movement (and the workers who see the value in their unions) are resilient. Of the 30 or so unions that have gone through recertification elections so far, most have seen their unions successfully recertified with over 80 percent of voters in support. Spar recently shared that the average for FEA-affiliated unions was 90 percent.

A full recovery from S.B. 256, if that’s truly possible, could take years without a repeal.

But this example in Jackonsville is just the beginning.