Florida Locals Continue Fight Against Union-Busting State Senate Bill 256
In a union-busting move, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) implemented a public sector labor law in 2023, passed by Republicans in the Florida House and Senate. The law, referred to as SB 256, requires a 60% union membership threshold for the union to avoid mandatory recertification elections every year. Dues deduction is banned, so unions have to switch all of their members over from payroll dues deduction to electronic dues payment. Florida also adopted new and costly financial audit rules and more mandatory paperwork for local union officers and individual members to complete. All of this is just to keep their union and collective bargaining agreements alive and in effect.
Workers Under Attack
Those not completing the new and outrageous requirements of the law face annual decertification elections, and if they lose those, total workplace control reverts to the employer and its management. All of this came into effect on July 1, 2023. Since then, roughly 60,000 public sector workers in the state have lost their union and their union contract.
Under International President John Costa’s leadership, the International worked with our Florida Locals to fight back with a comprehensive strategy to combat this bill by working with our Locals across the state to sign up nonmembers. Through aggressive political action, ATU won a waiver from the worst of SB 256 for our transit Locals, although these waivers could be under threat from the Trump Administration.
ATU Local 1464—which represents City of Tampa workers—could not get a transit waiver because it is a general public sector bargaining unit. Back in the ‘60s and ‘70s, when public sector unionization was popping up all over the state, ATU Locals had to petition for wall-to-wall units of transit and non-transit workers within their municipality. Local 1464 comes out of that wave of organizing, with sister local, Local 1593, representing Tampa-area transit workers. Local 1464 members work in a variety of fields serving residents of Tampa, including parks and recreation, water treatment, construction, emergency communications, waste management, among many other fields.
Fighting Back
Led by their President/Business Agent Stephen Simon, Local 1464 worked hard to sign up its members to meet the 60% threshold. Not only did they complete the challenging task of signing members up to pay electronic dues through an electronic payment processing system, Local 1464 also had to fulfill SB 256’s requirement for an individual, signed form, referred to as the Florida Public Employee Relations Commission (PERC) form.
Signing up hundreds of members in a short amount of time to meet PERC’s deadline was no small task. In a matter of weeks, the Local and International organizers signed up 600 new members into the union. President/Business Agent Simon, Local officers, and leaders met workers in “park days,” where they met to educate members on the importance of signing up in open-shop Florida and the new threat SB 256 poses to their collective bargaining rights. Not only that, but sign-ups also then moved on to various properties throughout the city. This involved tough one-on-one conversations, phone banking, and carefully building of a membership list done by Financial Secretary Treasure Deidre Fransaw.
“I am proud of the work Local 1464 and all our Florida Locals did fighting back against this anti-union legislation that threatened the voices and rights of our members and all workers across the Sunshine State,” said Costa.