GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Twenty hours each week, Cassie Urbenz acts as a therapist, lawyer and customer service representative.
As president of the Graduate Assistants United chapter at the University of Florida, Urbenz handles the grievances of over 4,000 fellow union members, helps them fill out paperwork and shows them how to access their benefits.
Urbenz says she’s not only helping union members but the university as well.
“It's helpful for [workers] to have peer support,” she said. “It's in the best interest of the university and helps facilitate the success of its employees.”
Under a contentious bill in the Republican-controlled state Legislature, Urbenz’s union — and others like it around the state — could face decertification. The bill passed with a 73-37 split in the House and a 20-14 vote in the Senate. All voting Democratic lawmakers in both houses opposed the bill; the vast majority of Republicans voted in favor, with 13 GOP votes against.
The legislation was sent to Gov. Ron DeSantis on Thursday. He has until May 15 to act on the measure. It would take effect July 1 if the governor doesn’t veto the bill, which is considered unlikely.
The legislation essentially establishes two classes of public unions in Florida: public safety unions — like police, correctional officers and firefighters — who are exempted from the provisions of the bill and all other public employee unions that will be subject to new measures. That includes unions representing teachers, health care workers, and municipal and county government employees, among others.
The most controversial new requirements — that critics say raise serious constitutional issues — include a prohibition on certain political activity by union members and raise the bar in how union certification votes must be conducted.
Specifically, those provisions of the bill would impact public employee unions by:
- Barring public employers from compensating union representatives in any way with taxpayer funds if they are engaging in certain “employee organization activities,” which can include lobbying to influence legislation or participating in campaign and political activities. The provision does not apply to public safety unions.
- Creating a requirement for a certification vote authorizing the establishment of a new union bargaining unit to be valid at least 50% of those workers in the bargaining unit must participate. Previously, there was no requirement that a certain percentage of the bargaining unit must take part in the vote. Public safety unions are exempt from the 50% participation provision.
Also, existing union bargaining units in which fewer than 60% of the workers in the bargaining unit have not submitted membership forms and are not paying union dues would be required to go through a recertification vote. Public safety unions are not subject to that provision, either.
“If we as elected officials were to hold ourselves to that same standard, many of us would not even be in office right now,” said Rep. Anna Eskamani, D-Orlando. “Our Legislature just keeps moving the goalposts when it comes to the right to collectively bargain.”
This effort is the most recent by state lawmakers to clamp down on non-public safety employee unions in the last few years, although the state constitution guarantees the right to unionize and collectively bargain and says that right “shall not be abridged.” Most significantly, in 2023 DeSantis signed into law another measure that prohibited public employers, on behalf of the unions, from automatically deducting union dues from workers’ paychecks, leaving it to the unions to do it themselves. Public employee unions were exempted from that provision. The 2023 law has been challenged in court over the years and the new law adds to some of its provisions.
A bill analysis by the state Senate staff on a slightly different earlier version of the legislation noted that it “appears to create two distinct classes of public employees.”
The rights to collectively bargain and freedom of speech “are treated differently between the two distinct classes of public employees created by the bill,” the analysis found, referring to public safety and non-public safety unions. “In effect, the bill risks violating those fundamental constitutional rights while imposing unequal treatment.”
Eskamani and other critics charge that the legislation is an attempt to retaliate politically against teachers unions and their members, who have been largely supportive of Democrats and their policies.
For instance, the Florida Education Association, the statewide teachers union with about 150,000 members, making it the largest public employee union in the state, tends to endorse Democratic candidates. Most of its political spending over the last 20 years has been on behalf of Democratic candidates. By contrast, public safety unions are much more likely to back incumbents, regardless of political party affiliation, in an effort to boost their influence by supporting those candidates they believe have the best shot at winning.
“[Teachers] are the ones that are specifically having a problem,” bill sponsor state Sen. Jonathan Martin, R-Fort Myers, said in an interview with Fresh Take Florida. “I wasn't hearing problems for law enforcement, firefighters and first responder unions. The examples I saw dealing with very low voter turnout [in union certification and related votes] tended to be in the education space.”
He added, “I filed this bill because unions got in the way of teachers…This bill is against unions who don’t have buy-in from their workers.”
Democratic lawmakers assailed the legislation as an assault on unions.
“This bill is creating winners and losers, and it just is part of a continuing pattern where the Republicans in the majority continue to…make it more difficult for public workers to organize,” said House Democratic Leader Fentrice Driskell, D-Temple Terrace.
Questioned by lawmakers, Martin defended exempting public safety unions, saying that treating the two groups of unions differently already is precedent in Florida law, a reference to the 2023 bill that blocked automatic payroll deductions for non-public safety unions.
Lori Bradner, a union representative for Randall Middle School in the Hillsborough Classroom Teachers Association, testified against the bill in Tallahassee in February, arguing that restricting how union leaders are paid when they engage in political activity violates their free speech rights.
“I want to be heard — not as a Democrat, not as a Republican — but as a person, as a mom,” Bradner, a Republican and teacher for 17 years, said in an interview. “This is my livelihood.”
Opponents of the bill also criticized sponsors for working on the legislation with the Freedom Foundation, an anti-union think tank that critics note is supported by some prominent wealthy conservatives.
“The reason for it is because [unions] collectively bargain in favor of their workers to make more money, and they make it harder to fire people,” Sen. Tina Polsky, D-Boca Raton, said. “All the protections that unions provide workers they want to go away.”
Rusty Brown, director of special projects for the Freedom Foundation, a free market conservative think tank, acknowledged his organization was involved in the legislation.
“This is something we've advocated for for a long time, but it would be unfair to say that we wrote the bill from inception to…creation to implementation,” Brown said in an interview. “We were involved in that process; we advocated to the governor's office.”
Brown said the legislation is needed because there is no recourse for union members who have issues with their union’s leadership and activities.
Unions have been “around for 50 years… with no real, meaningful way for their members that they represent to hold them accountable,” he said.
Urbenz, the Graduate Assistants union leader at UF, said she had been working in her union post on release time from her teaching assistant job while continuing to be paid her salary by UF. To comply with the law, UF and the union have already agreed that she will be paid going forward by the union.
Ubenz said the bill needlessly complicates and makes much more difficult the process of union organizing. She called Florida a “a ‘fight-to-work’ state, not a right-to-work state.”
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This story was produced by Fresh Take Florida, a news service of the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications. The reporter can be reached at zherukhamarta@ufl.edu. You can donate to support our students here.