Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Educators are under attack
Over the past year, educators in Florida have been working overtime to support our students in incredibly difficult conditions. We have logged long hours, turned our homes into classrooms and reinvented curricula multiple times, all to ensure that Florida’s students continue to benefit from one of the highest rated public education systems in the country.
And yet, the Florida Legislature has responded by attacking us and attempting to limit our rights. This legislative session has been full of proposed bills that directly target education, from Senate Bill 86, which sought to block students from receiving scholarships if they were pursuing majors that the Legislature does not value, to Senate Bill 264 and its companion House Bill 233, which seek to require educators to complete an annual survey of their ideological and political views.
In this atmosphere, the right to unionize and to have a say over our working conditions is absolutely vital for Florida’s teachers. This is why, amid a crowded field, two bills stand out as particularly dangerous for Florida’s educators and our students. These bills seek to dismantle the unions we have built over decades — unions that represent our commitment to protect our working conditions, which are our students’ learning conditions.
If passed, Senate Bill 1014 and House Bill 835 will undermine the freedom of Florida educators to choose when they join or leave a union. Instead of allowing individual workers the freedom to choose whether they want to join a union or how long they want to stay in the union, these bills seek to dismantle unions that fall below a 50% membership threshold. They also would require all members of teachers’ unions to reinstate their membership every few years. On the face of it, these might seem like minor changes, but they are far from innocuous.
Since Florida is a “right to work” state, many members of a particular bargaining unit receive most of the benefits of union membership without ever joining the union. Surveys show that the vast majority of these employees appreciate the work that the union does even though they do not choose to become dues-paying members. For those employees who do choose to be dues-paying members of the union, it is outrageous for the government to propose to cancel our union membership unilaterally every few years and force us to go through the process of refiling paperwork. Additionally, these bills propose to make that process more complicated and time-consuming, which means that individuals who want to be members of the union will be forced out of their union against their will and then compelled to jump through additional bureaucratic hoops to rejoin. This is not freedom, and let’s face it — these bills will drive qualified faculty away from Florida’s educational system precisely at the moment our growing state is in need of such skilled professionals.
Not only do these bills create unnecessary burdens for educators, but they risk violating the Florida Constitution as well as existing labor laws. The costs they will impose have not been honestly calculated, from the additional staff that employers will need to hire to process the added paperwork, to the potential for litigation to correct this unconstitutional overreach. These bills are solutions in search of a problem.
Their proponents claim that these bills are about protecting public sector workers from the unions, as if the unions aren’t run by and for the workers themselves. Moreover, if these bills were actually about protecting public sector workers, they would apply to all public workers. Tellingly, SB 1014 and HB 835 would only attack the rights of educators to collectively bargain — these bills do not impact other professions with unions such as police and firefighters.
As educators, we know we have gone above and beyond this year to ensure our students’ needs are met. It is shameful that in response, we are facing divisive attacks from lawmakers who are trying to limit our right to have a say over our working conditions. Don’t let the Florida Legislature punish our teachers.