The pandemic helped expose teachers’ unions as bad apples.
A day of reckoning is coming for them.
And teacher unions are raising hell after Florida delivered on this promise.
Florida receives top grade for keeping teachers’ unions in check
Public employee unions are a bad deal for taxpayers and for the workers, they claim to represent.
Government unions spend billions of dollars every election cycle helping Democrats from the union dues they rip out of their members’ paychecks.
A new study from the Commonwealth Foundation titled The Battle for Worker Freedom: Grading State Public Sector Labor Laws found that Florida set the “gold standard for pro-worker, pro-taxpayer public sector labor reform.”
“As time passes, new labor laws that protect worker freedom will test legislative efforts to counter government union influence. In Florida, where union influence is already limited, the economy is booming, making it one of the fastest-growing states in the country,” the study stated.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed Senate Bill 256 into law in 2023 to bring more accountability to most public sector unions in the state.
The bill informed public employees of what their rights are in a unionized workplace and unions are required to file publicly available financial statements disclosing what they spent their money on.
It stopped the automatic deductions of union dues from the paychecks of Florida public employees.
The government should not serve as the collection agent for a private organization.
Now, public employees must write a check to the union if they want to join.
To prevent zombie unions that no longer have the support of anyone in the workplace, public employee unions are required to have 60% of members paying dues or a recertification election is triggered.
Unions are often voted in decades before any of the current workers start.
Commonwealth Foundation Senior Labor Policy Fellow David Osborne, the co-author, praised states that loosened the stranglehold public sector unions have on workers.
“We applaud those states that have stepped up to defend the rights of their workers from public sector union abuses, and we urge every other state to do the same,” Osborne said.
Public sector unions losing power nationally
The Supreme Court’s 2018 Janus vs AFSCME decision found that public sector unions could not force employees to pay union dues as a condition of employment.
Since 2022, the four largest public employee unions in the country have lost more than 100,000 dues-paying members.
The American Federation of Teachers (AFT), American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), National Education Association (NEA), and Service Employees International Union (SEIU) are the four biggest public sector unions in the country.
Those unions have lost more than 300,000 members and over $106 million in union dues since the Janus decision.
During the 2022 Midterm Elections, those four unions spent more than $700 million backing Democrats and left-wing causes.
“The lesson is clear: Government union executives use their power to build immense political machines, control workplaces, and lobby against beneficial fiscal and educational reforms,” the Commonwealth Foundation study said. “Along the way, these union executives appear more concerned with achieving their organizational and political goals than defending the interests of the workers they represent.”
Bringing accountability to public sector unions takes money and power away from them and back into the hands of the workers they claim to represent.
DeSantis Daily will keep you up-to-date on any new developments in this ongoing story.
