American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten is afraid that a group of Florida educators have had enough of their teachers’ union.
American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten is afraid that a group of Florida educators have had enough of their teachers’ union.
L ast month, American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten tweeted out a warning to her followers, “Freedom Foundation, associated with Betsy DeVos and Gov. DeSantis, are spending a boatload of money to union bust United Teachers of Dade in Miami b/c they want to destroy public education & unions.” As usual, she has things all balled up. But she’s right to feel threatened. Miami-Dade teachers are trying to free themselves from her tentacles and form their own local education coalition in what would be the largest teachers’-union decertification in U.S. history.
Under a new Florida law, if a local bargaining unit can’t prove active membership of 60 percent of the employees it represents, the union rank and file can hold a vote to determine if they want to dissolve or replace the union. And that’s exactly what educators in Miami-Dade are considering: replacing political, unaccountable union leaders with an independent coalition run by educators, for educators.
The Freedom Foundation is only pushing for an election to codify what the Miami-Dade educators have already enthusiastically expressed. They want local leadership focused on workplace-quality concerns, not a political agenda like that offered by the current United Teachers of Dade (UTD) president Karla Hernández-Mats, who was the 2022 running mate of former Florida governor Charlie Crist. The union doesn’t speak for the district’s teachers and probably never did. Consequently, it should no longer be recognized as the exclusive representative of their bargaining unit.
CBS News Miami recently began a series about the Miami-Dade teachers’ attempt to throw off their union in favor of the new coalition. The report, which accused the Freedom Foundation of “targeting” UTD, showed a sampling of the direct-mail pieces the organization has sent to local teachers, footage taken at the Freedom Foundation’s first-ever teacher summit held this past summer in Denver, Colo., and a snippet from a Freedom Foundation–produced video.
Near the end of the report, its producers concede that the Miami-Dade teachers’ movement is made possible by S.B. 256, a law passed this summer by Florida’s own duly elected legislature. Among provisions such as stripping unions of undeserved political perks, intended to make the state’s public-sector unions more transparent and accountable to their members, the measure requires any government union whose paid membership falls below 60 percent of the entire bargaining unit to hold a recertification election.
UTD claims that its current membership stands at 57 percent of the Miami-Dade educator workforce, up from 52 percent this summer. However, this increase in membership — assuming there really is one — doesn’t indicate the union has successfully recruited new members or won recommitments from old ones. Instead, UTD has been expelling substitute teachers from the bargaining unit in an attempt to swing the percentages back in its favor. The union’s membership numbers have been trending in the opposite direction for years, which presented an opportunity for the Freedom Foundation. But any disenchantment the teachers have with the union is its own fault. If UTD ultimately dies, its wounds will be self-inflicted.
As for the prospect of a recertification election, if UTD were, in fact, providing the valuable service it claims it does, there’s no reason why it should fear a referendum. Government-employee unions aren’t Supreme Court justices or popes. They’re not elected for life like banana-republic dictators. United Teachers of Dade was originally certified in 1974 and hasn’t had to justify its existence since. The fact that nearly half of the Miami-Dade teachers have already stood up to the union and refused to pay dues is clear evidence that it has no credibility with the majority of those it’s supposed to be working for.
There is a variety of possible reasons for their feeling this way, most notably the millions of dollars in dues funneled by UTD every year to its national partners, such as Weingarten’s American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association. Those Miami-Dade teachers still aligned with UTD each pay the union about $1,000 a year, the majority of which is spent on far-left candidates and causes favored by the union’s leaders — whose bloated salaries and benefits gobble up much of what’s left over. Only a tiny fraction of what’s collected is used on collective bargaining or advocacy for better pay or working conditions.
The unions and their allies in the media are working hard to portray this movement as something that a scary, out-of-state organization is trying to foist on Florida teachers. In fact, it’s the opposite. The impetus to decertify UTD is a grassroots effort spearheaded by the Miami Dade Education Coalition, which is led by longtime Miami-Dade teachers.
Miami-Dade teachers have been victimized for decades by union leaders who want to confiscate their money and use it to line their own pockets and advance a spectrum of failed progressive ideas. And teachers are sick of it. Rather than waste time on ad hominem attacks against us, maybe UTD should start to put its own house in order.