TALLAHASSEE – On Monday, a Senate panel changed a bill (SB 1296) to lower the voting threshold for some public sector unions to be recertified in a bill.
On Wednesday, the full Senate reversed that move, raising the threshold again to require 50 percent of the represented members of a public sector union to vote for it to be valid.
Senators who supported the original change, which moved the threshold to 25 percent of members voting while requiring 60 percent of the actual vote to be recertified, weren’t pleased.
“My district, they don’t want it,” Sen. Ileana Garcia, R-Miami, told Sen. Jonathan Martin, R-Fort Myers, the bill sponsor. “We amended it in (the Senate Fiscal Policy Committee). We got to a good place. We rolled it back, and now Senator (Alexis) Calatayud, Senator (Ana Maria) Rodriguez and myself, we’re left to give explanations,” she added referring to two other Miami Republicans.
Martin defended his proposals and the changes, arguing he’s trying to go after unions that don’t represent their full membership.
After the change on Monday, the bill squeaked out of the committee on a 10-8 vote. The reversal Thursday sets up a final vote on the Senate floor Friday. If it passes, it would still require a House vote to head to Gov. Ron DeSantis’ desk.
Democrats also took issue the bill because it carves out unions representing first responders, including police, firefighters and emergency medical technicians, which often support Republicans, while targeting unions that represent nurses, teachers and other government workers, which often support Democrats.
Sen. Shevrin Jones, D-Miami Gardens, noted the Florida Freedom Foundation, a conservative think tank opposed to government unions, helped draft the bill.
“They brought you this legislation because they want to get rid of teachers unions,” Jones told Martin.
Martin said his goal was to target “bad unions,” not all unions. He explained he was prompted to act after a teachers’ union in his Lee County district sued over a plan to give teachers more money to work in underperforming schools.
“The goal here wasn’t to pit one set of union against another, it was to go after an issue I saw in my district … with unions getting in the way with teachers getting paid to do what they want to do, which is educate students,” Martin said.
Another piece of the bill limits the time union workers can devote to political activities on public time. Education Commissioner Anastasios Kamoutsas has supported the bill and slammed the Florida Education Association for hosting a speaker at an event who advocated for students to walk out of classrooms to protest.
