Preventing the Worst, Struggling for Better: UFF Representing You to the Florida Legislature

The regular 2020 session of the Florida Legislature ended with a whimper on March 19 as the pandemic changed everyone’s priorities.  As usual, with reactionary forces dominating, your union was mostly struggling to prevent the worst legislation from passing while advancing some bills to improve higher education in Florida wherever possible.  Every year a lot of bad things don’t happen because UFF is on the job.  In 2011, for example, many faculty remember that the Legislature mandated a 3% increase in employee contributions to the Florida Retirement System, effectively a 3% pay cut.  What many faculty don’t remember is that if it weren’t for UFF and its union affiliates, that pay cut would have been 6%.

This year, with the help of the Florida Education Association, our K-12 affiliate union with 135,000 members, and the Florida AFL-CIO, we BLOCKED the following:

• Legislation to make secret the names of all applicants (except the top three) for president of any Florida public higher education institution.  Your union has consistently and successfully opposed such secrecy bills for the last six legislative sessions.
• Anti-union legislation mandating that employers not only receive a signed authorization form from faculty for union dues deduction (the current policy), but also independently confirm with the employee that she or he authorized such deductions.  As we pointed out, such a law would place the university between the union and its members.
• A bill to merge Florida Polytechnic University and New College of Florida with the University of Florida — against the wishes of the faculty, students and leaders of those institutions, and with no evidence that it would save any money.
• A bill mandating a survey at every public university and college that would ostensibly report annually on “intellectual freedom and political diversity” on each campus.  Such legislation follows a template distributed nationally to conservative state legislators by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and defines “intellectual freedom and political diversity” in ways that would violate the academic freedom of faculty and students.
• Legislation to force universities and colleges to allow guns on campus.  Your union has been a leader in opposing such legislation for years, and the UFF President has testified against the bills.  This year the bills were not even heard in committee.

On the other hand, your union was able to make some positive contributions to the major higher education bill.  Among the provisions in this bill is one supportive of reports by UFF-FAU and other union chapters on misplaced administration priorities — how their administrators move money from teaching faculty to non-teaching staff, especially administrators’ own salaries and staff.  The new higher education law requires the Board of Governors (BOG) to include in their legislative budget request 5-year trend information on the number of faculty and administrators at each university, definitions of faculty and administrator classifications, and the proportion of FTE dedicated to instruction and research compared to administration.

In addition, average university funding increased by 1.8% (no FAU figures yet), but that increase will be offset by an increase in the Florida Retirement System rates the state charges to universities and colleges.  And the coronavirus means that state tax collections will  decrease significantly, and a special session of the legislature will likely occur later this year to define budget cuts.  

As many of you are already aware, FAU academic managers didn’t wait for the coronavirus pandemic to announce their own FAU budget cuts to academic programs.  Their reasons for such cuts have been consistently vague and inadequate, and they have made no effort to demonstrate that such cuts are being made fairly.  So they are making conflicts with faculty and students, and damage to the core mission of the university, virtually inevitable, even before budget cuts resulting from the pandemic take effect.