It was just recently that some South Florida teachers unions prevailed with votes to ensure that they can keep operating under state law. And yet, they’re now instantly readying for the next elections to arrive.
The Palm Beach Classroom Teachers Association submitted to the state earlier this week cards from teachers that show interest for an election, said Gordan Longhofer, the group’s president.
The Broward Teachers Union also has gathered interest cards from teachers and the union’s bargaining units for charter school, educational support and technical support employees to officially file an election, said Anna Fusco, president of the group.
Such steps at this stage illustrate how Florida education unions have remained vigilant of the requirements set by a state law in 2023, including recertification.
Among the additional hurdles from voting — which was previously required only once to certify the groups — are that unions must meet an extensive set of deadlines to remain in good standing.
The teachers “are very annoyed by having to do this over and over,” Longhofer said. “But they’re not going to be dissuaded from the commitment that they have to their students and to their profession, and so they will engage in what must be done.”
Here’s a look at some unions’ efforts.
Broward and Palm Beach counties
The Broward Teachers Union recertification election for a previous school year was held July 14, with over 97% of the teachers who voted casting their ballots for the union to remain.
“We showed [the state] that people do care,” Fusco said.
Now, the group is looking at another election to again determine whether teachers want their union.
That’s because only 55% of Broward’s eligible teachers are dues-paying members in the union, falling short of a requirement set by the law that passed in 2023.
The legislation made it so that unions have to annually recertify, which happens through an election when fewer than 60% of a county’s teachers are dues-paying members of their union.
The law also removed the ability for government agencies to automatically deduct union dues from an employee’s payroll.
The next elections for both Broward and Palm Beach will be to recertify the union for this past school year.
The Palm Beach Classroom Teachers Association’s election to recertify the group for a previous school year was in May, with over 98% of the teachers who voted casting their ballots to keep the union.
About 51% of eligible Palm Beach County teachers are union members, Longhofer said, adding that the group hasn’t had a 60% membership in at least 20 years.
The teachers union in Miami held and won an election for recertification last year after also not getting 60% of the county’s teachers to be dues-paying members.
About 40 of Florida’s education unions met the threshold needed to avoid an election, Andrew Spar, president of the Florida Education Association, told the South Florida Sun Sentinel last month.
Longhofer declined to estimate when the Palm Beach County election will be held, because of how long it took the agency that oversees the implementation of this law — the Public Employees Relations Committee — to schedule the last vote.
The union had waited a year.
Why the wait?
In order to have the election, the Public Employees Relations Committee must identify all of the school district’s eligible teachers who can vote, including their mailing address, said Marcus Braswell, a Coral Gables lawyer who has worked on union cases before the commission.
Braswell said especially for larger school districts that have more teachers, “it’s just necessarily going to take a long while to get it done properly.”
And that comes after the unions have already filed all the paperwork needed to determine that an election is warranted — 30% of teachers must complete interest cards for there to be a vote.
The commission is receiving more requests for elections than it used to before the law was passed, when voting was only needed to certify a new union into existence.
The commission declined to answer questions from the Sun Sentinel regarding deadlines for elections, citing how it can’t comment on pending cases or provide legal interpretations outside of commission orders as an adjudicatory agency.
Though most of the elections held by the commission are for education groups — multiple education unions exist in each of Florida’s 67 school districts — the law applies to most public sector unions, meaning the commission is also overseeing elections for other industries.
Notably, the law exempts law enforcement, firefighter and correctional officer unions. Union leaders have argued these groups have been excluded because they’re more aligned with Republicans.
“The decision-makers who thought that this law, which applies to some [unions] but not others — if they learned that another result of it was that elections are delayed,” Braswell said, “they would be very happy with that.”
It isn’t required by law for the commission to explain how it determines when elections are scheduled, said Martin Powell, a lawyer from Tallahassee who represents education unions.
Some unions haven’t even had their first elections yet, despite others reaching their second already, like the teachers union in St. Lucie County heading into an election in August after winning its last one in May, Powell said.
“Because there are hundreds of these elections in an agency that’s accustomed to running a handful a year,” he said, “they’re unable to complete them before the same union is having to file to do it all over again.”
Powell said unions that haven’t been recertified in an election yet are still able to operate as normal.
The law
Florida is one of six states in the U.S. that enshrines rights for workers to collectively bargain, according to Harvard’s Center for Labor and a Just Economy.
Paul Donnelly, a Gainesville employment and labor lawyer, said Florida’s union rights started as a way to maintain labor peace, so that everyone in a workplace knows what’s going on.
“This has really thrown a monkey wrench into that,” he said.
Gov. Ron DeSantis said during a meeting in Tampa on Wednesday that one purpose behind the legislation is to remove the pressure that comes from signing the authorization form for union dues to be automatically deducted from a teacher’s payroll.
Florida’s Chief Financial Officer Blaise Ingoglia said during the gathering that he sponsored the legislation in 2023 when he was a state senator because he wants to keep union leadership accountable. He said he heard from teachers that the union was forcing them to educate students on material they didn’t believe in.
“They should be representing not just one ideology,” Ingoglia said. “You are there to bargain and present on behalf of all the teachers.”
So far, none of the teachers unions that held elections lost the recertification, according to union leaders.
Still, some smaller unions that didn’t meet the membership threshold also couldn’t gather enough support through interest cards to warrant a vote and had to be dismantled.
Going into the school year, both Fusco and Longhofer said they’re implementing recruitment strategies to raise the membership in their respective unions in hopes of avoiding elections.
Of the extra hurdles under the state law, “it’s just a tactic to take away and beat down unions,” Fusco said.
In the meantime, the teachers unions are expected to pay in tandem with school districts for the election costs, according to labor and employment lawyers. The parties will split the cost of postage for the ballots that were mailed to all of the teachers who were eligible to vote — 13,079 teachers in Palm Beach County and 13,286 teachers in Broward County.
Longhofer said he estimates the cost for the Palm Beach County election to be between $20,000 and $24,000, though the bill hasn’t arrived yet.
A spokesperson for the Palm Beach County School District said it also has not yet received a bill for the election.
It also hasn’t come in for the Broward Teachers Union election, Fusco said, and she doesn’t know how much to expect in price.
Powell, the Tallahassee lawyer, said the commission used to pay for postage stamps, but that has since stopped.
“All the talking points for justifying these additional regulations being placed on unions have not come to fruition or even been close to it, in my opinion,” Powell said about the law, “So it’s really just generating a lot of extra work and confusion about how to be in the union, or how to maintain a union, with no practical benefit for the public or taxpayers.”
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