Miami-Dade teachers vote to keep their union. This right-wing group vows to bust it
The United Teachers of Dade won their recertification vote allowing the union to continue to be the collective bargaining representative for Miami-Dade teachers. This comes despite attempts by a recent law to destabilize the union and substantial amounts of money being funneled into an alternative group attempting to supplant the union.
“This victory is a testament to what we educators can accomplish when we stand united,” said Karla Hernandez-Mats, president of the United Teachers of Dade.
The United Teachers of Dade won with 83 percent of the vote. The Miami Dade Education Coalition, a group funded by the right-wing Freedom Foundation that campaigned as an alternative to the union, received 14 percent of the votes. Three percent of teachers voted in favor of no union.
Because of SB256, a law that went into effect last October, unions around the state such as the teachers unions are now required to have 60 percent of members paying dues or go to an election. Previously, they only needed 50 percent of members to pay dues. Unions for police, firefighters and corrections officers are exempted from the law. The law further complicates the process of dues collection by prohibiting the union from automatically deducting dues from teachers’ paychecks.
In spite of the loss, the Freedom Foundation told the Miami Herald that they intend to continue to fight against Miami-Dade’s teachers union, though the leadership of the Miami Dade Education Coalition said they had not yet decided how to proceed.
“It’s not a we give it a shot, and we’re just backing out,” said Rusty Brown, the National Outreach Coordinator for the Freedom Foundation after the election results came out.
Because the United Teachers of Dade currently collects only 57 percent of members dues, the recertification process is likely to have to be repeated.
Critics of the law call it union busting and say the laws are an attempt to force unions to be so focused on collecting dues and getting recertified that they are limited in their ability to properly address the needs of their members.
“They want to keep us tied up and involved in politics, in the political side of this in perpetuity, until they break us, or we give up,” said Jeffrey Garcia, a consultant for the United Teachers of Dade.
But the election results on Wednesday indicate that despite attempts to weaken the union, United Teachers of Dade still maintains strong support.
Governor DeSantis has been vocally critical of the Miami-Dade teachers union. Earlier this summer, while in Miami to announce an increase in teacher pay, he noted that the increases were “in spite of those unions, not because of them.”
Hernandez-Mats, the president of the teachers union in Miami-Dade, ran with former Governor Charlie Crist when he challenged DeSantis for governor in 2022.
‘We will spend whatever it takes’
It is not clear exactly how much the Freedom Foundation gave the Miami Dade Education Coalition to support them in their election, but Brown from the Freedom Foundation told the Miami Herald that it was “certainly not a small amount.”
The philosophy of the Freedom Foundation was “we will spend whatever it takes,” he said. He added that since he is not required to disclose the spending, he would not share that information.
The links between Tallahassee and the Freedom Foundation are easy to see. Last year, Manny Diaz, the Florida commissioner of education, was the keynote speaker at the Freedom Foundation conference in Denver.
The Freedom Foundation is part of a larger network of conservative think tanks focused on state-level policy, and part of a growing trend nationally to attempt to weaken labor unions.
The Freedom Foundation says it exists to support government employees who have been “robbed by the union,” and that just because the group they supported in this election did not win, does not mean they will back down.
Since the law went into effect, WLRN has reported that across Florida at least 63,000 public employees have had their labor unions decertified because of the anti-union laws.
Litigation at the federal level has made it possible for laws such as SB256 to go into effect. In 2018, the supreme court ruled that employees are not required to pay union dues, and gave states greater discretion to implement laws around labor unions.
But Florida was already a right-to-work state, meaning that union membership and payment is voluntary. Even non-dues-paying members will reap the benefits of negotiations made by unions.
What’s next for the Miami Dade Education Coalition
The Miami Dade Education Coalition appeals to teachers by offering lower dues, which they say they will be able to offer by not paying into the American Federation of Teachers and National Education Association, the largest labor unions in the nation.
Only around 37 percent of the approximately 23,678 eligible voters cast a vote-by-mail ballot in the certification election, which was administered by The Public Employees Relations Committee (PERC). The commissioners of PERC are all appointed by Governor DeSantis, and members of both the United Teachers of Dade and the Freedom Foundation were physically present while the ballots were tallied on Wednesday. There were no members of the Miami Dade Education Coalition present.
Both UTD and MDEC say they would have liked higher turnout in the election.
Brent Urbanik, a high school psychology teacher and president of MDEC, told the Herald, “What happened was a mix of voter apathy, learned helplessness, and restrictions on sharing message placed on us by the district.”
The Miami Dade Education Coalition filed a petition challenging the fairness of the election based on an alleged disparity between UTD and MDEC’s ability to contact Miami-Dade teachers. MDEC says they were unable to send emails to teachers and also unable to access teachers’ mailboxes. They subsequently withdrew their petition, but say they still believe the election was unfair because both groups were not on an even playing field.
And though the Freedom Foundation has stated that they will continue to “provide support and resources to public employees seeking local alternatives to Big Labor” in Florida, some teachers in the leadership of MDEC are still determining if they can continue this fight.
Renee Zayas, who has been teaching for 35 years and currently works as a special education teacher at Miami Springs Senior High, spent the last year working 14 hour days both teaching and running the Miami Dade Education Coalition. “I am done for now,” she said.
Despite the assistance from the Freedom Foundation – who provided printed materials, and even sent a troop of workers to Miami to knock on doors, she said the scare tactics used by the United Teachers of Dade worked.
“This was done for the love of education and it’s taken a toll on me,” she added.
