Why thousands of workers in Florida are losing their labor unions. WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?
In St. Johns County, on the Atlantic shore of Northeast Florida, more than 55% of public school teachers paid their union dues this last year. Despite that, nearly 3,500 teachers are facing the threat of their union representation being revoked. At the same time, in Southwest Florida, only 16% of law enforcement officers of the Charlotte County Sheriff’s Office paid union dues last year. Their union is under absolutely no threat of being decertified.
A year after Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law a sweeping anti-union bill requiring most public sector unions to boost the rate of members paying dues or be disbanded, the full effects of the new union rules are coming into clear view — double standards and all.
Law enforcement, firefighter and correctional officer unions are exempt from the new law, no matter how few members pay union dues.
For other public-sector unions, what is emerging is an outright crisis.
A labor economist warned that the law could prove to be more effective in destroying labor power in Florida than the landmark Act 10 proved to be in Wisconsin; that law is broadly considered one of the strongest anti-union laws ever passed by a state government.
After reviewing hundreds of pages of state union recertification filings, WLRN can reveal that already, several tens of thousands of workers have quietly lost their collective bargaining rights, a right that is explicitly protected by the Florida Constitution.
Unions representing tens of thousands of additional publicsector workers across the state are in danger of being decertified and dissolved.
The numbers are not being tracked or published by the state or any labor organization, so WLRN requested the records and created a public database to track the fallout of the law.
Most affected employees perform core public-sector jobs like teaching in schools, doing clerical work for state and local government, repairing engines and machinery for government agencies, answering 911 calls at call centers, and working at city parks.
Public-sector unions help negotiate everything from break times to purchasing new equipment to setting standards for general working conditions and laying out a process for discipline or termination of employees. Without a union to negotiate or enforce a collective bargaining agreement, those negotiated worker protections can be reversed.
Some advocates fear that as collective bargaining agreements are threatened or are outright killed, it will affect how many people choose to work in the public sector, something that can directly in turn affect public services for millions of Floridians.
A MAJOR IMPACT ON DECADES-OLD UNIONS
Dozens of the at-risk unions have existed in Florida for decades, stretching back a full 50 years to 1974, when the Florida Public Relations Act required the state and local governments to negotiate with unions in good faith.
The full scope of the new law is still coming into focus, but it is abundantly clear that it will have a major impact on labor in Florida for the foreseeable future.
“The work conditions of hundreds of thousands of people are going to be up in the air,” said Rich Templin, the director of politics and public policy for the AFL-CIO Florida. “That’s real lives. That’s not politics. That’s not pro-union, anti-union — it’s none of that. People’s lives are going to be upended.”
The AFL-CIO is the largest labor organization in Florida, representing over 500 local unions across the state. The group stringently fought SB 256 from going into effect, and is attempting to change small, technical parts of the 2023 law in the current legislative session. Templin concedes the proposed changes are around the margins, not at the heart of that law.
The sweeping law was proposed by Florida Republicans as a series of “paycheck protections” for public-sector employees — protections that excluded police, firefighters and correctional officers. Unions would be forced to engage more with their members and would come out stronger in the end, Republicans argued.
Yet many unions have not come out the other side stronger; they have simply been wiped out.
The scope of the potential fallout is difficult to put into words without becoming a massive, eye-blurring list.
Non-instructional staffers at the biggest public colleges in the state, including museum workers, grant writers, groundskeepers, teacher aides, secretaries and others have already fully been decertified, according to the state. The list includes staffers at Florida International University, the University of Central Florida, Florida State University,