Orlando Weekly
By McKenna Schueler on Thu, Feb 27, 2025 at 2:39 pm
Building on an anti-union law that the state Legislature and Gov. Ron DeSantis approved in 2023, Florida state lawmakers have filed new legislation that would make it harder for local and state government workers to form unions, and to keep the unions they already have alive.
More than 68,000 public employees in Florida have lost their union representation and union contracts as a result of the 2023 state law, which required more public workers to pay union dues, while simultaneously making it harder for them to do so.
Legislation filed Wednesday by Florida Sen. Randy Fine (SB 1328) and Rep. Dean Black (HB 1217), to be considered during Florida’s 2025 legislative session that begins next week, aims to go further.
If approved, the legislation would, for instance, get rid of statutory language that allows public employers in local and state governments to recognize a union, in lieu of an election, if the union can provide signed cards demonstrating a majority of the workers support joining the union.
This process, known as voluntary union recognition, has been disincentivized in other GOP-controlled states in recent years at the urging of right-wing special interest groups organized under the umbrella of the American Legislative Exchange Council. Described by critics as a conservative “bill mill,” ALEC is a network of groups that creates policy templates (like this conveniently similar one) for state lawmakers to introduce and enact in their own state Legislatures.
The Florida legislation would also make it even harder for public sector unions in Florida to become certified, remain certified and thereby represent the interests of workers such as teachers, public utility workers, bus drivers, and parks and recreation employees.
The bill would specifically require that a majority of workers vote in favor of either forming or recertifying their union in a union election in order for the union to prevail. Currently, winning a union election requires a vote of support from a majority of workers who vote — not the number of workers, total.
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University of Central Florida professor Robert Cassanello, a vice president of the statewide faculty union United Faculty of Florida, told Orlando Weekly it would be “almost impossible” for his union at UCF in Orlando — representing roughly 1,600 university faculty and staff — to get that kind of voter turnout.
Cassanello, an associate professor of history, sees this new proposal as another effort to target Florida educators, who are unionized at higher rates than most others in the workforce and who have become a “punching bag” (in Cassanello’s words) of the Florida GOP.
“In order to really threaten academic freedom, you have to threaten the professor and the instructor as a worker,” Cassanello said in an interview Thursday. “I think these bills, you know, stripping workplace protections, stripping [union] contracts, really make professors much more vulnerable in the classroom.”
Unions representing law enforcement, firefighters, correctional officers, and other public safety workers such as paramedics and emergency medical technicians (EMTs), would be exempted from the bill. Private sector workers, and workers employed by the federal government, also wouldn’t be affected.
Outlining the stakes
The difference in the level of support that is required for a union to prevail in an election matters.
As a result of a 2023 anti-union law, more than 100 public sector bargaining units in Florida (groups of workers represented by a union) have been dissolved by the state, simply for having low membership. Under the 2023 law, at least 60 percent of workers represented by a union need to be dues-paying members in order to remain certified.
If unions have a lower percentage of dues-paying members, they are either decertified (dissolved) or are forced to petition the state, annually, for a recertification election. Workers then get the opportunity to vote to keep their union alive, or get rid of it.
Public sector workers belonging to all but one union so far have overwhelmingly voted in favor of keeping their unions, which can negotiate things like guaranteed pay raises, more affordable healthcare coverage, paid maternity leave, and workplace safety protections.
But voter turnout in these elections — particularly those involving hundreds, or even thousands of workers — has in many cases admittedly been low.
Andrew Spar, president of the statewide teachers union, the Florida Education Association, told Orlando Weekly earlier this month that local teachers unions forced to recertify, due to the 2023 law, have won their elections by an average 93 percent vote of support.
“So what does that tell us? Well, that tells us that people want to keep their union, that we are just jumping through hoops that have been created by this legislation — and by the Governor’s office — and there’s no real value [to it],” Spar argued.
The Florida Education Association, a teachers union affiliated with the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers, represents more than 150,000 educators and other school staff statewide. It was considered the target of Florida’s 2023 law, as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis prepared to launch what ultimately developed into an unsuccessful U.S. presidential campaign.
Teachers unions have historically drawn the ire of the right-wing (and their billionaire allies) over disagreements on things like funding for public education, taxpayer-funded school vouchers, and the fact that education has the highest unionization rate of any U.S. sector.
They’ve also largely been unaffected by the mass wave of union decertifications that has hit Florida’s public sector so far. Casualties of the 2023 anti-union law so far have included all of the state’s adjunct faculty unions, nurses’ unions, unions representing attorneys for various state agencies, in addition to unions representing thousands of blue-collar workers such as school bus drivers, utility workers, janitors and others who choose public service despite often earning less than their similarly-educated peers in the private sector.
Maintenance and other workers at the University of South Florida saw their jobs privatized (and their pensions frozen) after the dissolution of their union.
The 2023 law has also threatened hundreds of millions of dollars in federal transit grants for local transit authorities, and has unduly burdened the state’s under-resourced public labor relations agency. The state Public Employees Relations Commission saw its caseload triple last year, directly as a result of the law, and has asked for more than $1 million in additional funding specifically to continue carrying it out.
Sen. Fine, who’s currently running for U.S. Congress, claims his new proposal will protect taxpayer dollars — echoing his colleagues’ argument in 2023. “This legislation will not only protect taxpayer dollars, but it will also help protect government employees from activist unions who aren’t supported by the majority of their union members,” Fine stated in a press release.
Public records obtained by Orlando Weekly show that the Freedom Foundation, an out-of-state dark money group that has backed similar anti-union policies in other states, pitched this 2025 legislation to a different state lawmaker, Sen. Blaise Ingoglia, last year.
Ingoglia, a DeSantis ally who sponsored Florida’s 2023 anti-union bill, didn’t bite.
The Freedom Foundation, in addition to other groups — including an anti-union legal defense fund led by labor consultants who have done union-busting for Amazon — have publicly claimed credit for the 2023 law, too.
An unoriginal proposal pitched by special interest groups
This new proposal from Fine — a Republican known for sponsoring culture-war bills — and Black isn’t original. It’s similar to a policy drawn up by ALEC, called the “Union Recertification Act.” Similar legislation was also successfully enacted in Iowa in 2017.
As the Center for Media and Democracy points out, there’s a strategic purpose to peddling these kinds of copy-cat proposals across GOP-controlled states. “Model bills like those developed and promulgated by ALEC serve a dual purpose: they both advance a cookie-cutter, pro-corporate agenda at the state level and create avenues for impact litigation whereby state laws are strategically implemented in order to generate court cases that can force a reshaping of federal regulations and protections,” writes Juliana Broad, a writer and researcher for the CMD.
Project 2025, a policy handbook from the right-wing Heritage Foundation that the Trump administration is swiftly adopting through various executive orders, has also targeted public sector unions and voluntary union recognition.
Democratic state lawmakers in Orange County, Florida on Wednesday vowed to fight their colleagues’ anti-union proposal. “It’s incredibly problematic,” said Florida Rep. Anna Eskamani, speaking to a crowd of more than 100 at a legislative town hall organized by the Orange County Democrats.
State Sen. Carlos Guillermo Smith, a former Florida House member who ran a successful bid for the state Senate this past year, emphasized the importance of organizing as a way to fight back. “The way that we were able to stop union-busting bills in the past has been collective organizing and it has been showing up in Tallahassee,” he said.
“It shouldn’t just be the labor community. Everyone should show up with labor,” Eskamani argued. “Even if you’re not in a union, we need you to show up for our union partners.”
Leadership for the Florida House did not respond to a request for comment on the legislation. A spokesperson for Senate leader Ben Albritton, a Republican, told Orlando Weekly that Albritton “does not plan to weigh in at this time.”