The Florida Legislature wrapped up its regular 60-day session, and it may go down as the least productive session in the state’s history. Lawmakers did not address property taxes; they did nothing to bring down the cost of homeowners’ insurance, and they ignored the millions of Floridians currently without health care.
They didn’t even pass a budget, which is the one thing they are required to do by law.
Instead, the governor and the legislature pushed more culture wars, passing a new anti-DEI bill and a bill granting DeSantis the ability to target certain individuals and groups as terrorist organizations. Legislators also forced through a measure that will make it harder for some people to vote.
What is Senate Bill 1296?
They also passed what is widely viewed as their latest union-busting bill.
On March 1, Facing South Florida took an in-depth look at Senate Bill 1296, which targeted public sector unions. The bill was sponsored by State Senator Jonathan Martin, a Republican from Fort Myers, and was pushed by the right-wing, billionaire-financed Freedom Foundation.
During a committee hearing, the Freedom Foundation’s Southern Director, Rusty Brown, testified that the foundation does not believe Florida workers should have the right to organize – even though that right is guaranteed in Florida’s Constitution.
The Freedom Foundation has never been shy about what its real intention is – which is to eliminate public sector unions. On their website – under a banner that reads “Why We Fight” – they argue that “government unions are a root cause of every growing national dysfunction in America.”
SB 1296 was introduced three years after the Freedom Foundation’s original union-busting bill, SB 256, passed the Florida Legislature. That bill, signed into law in 2023, made it harder for public sector unions to collect dues, while simultaneously forcing them to show that at least 60 percent of their members were paying their dues. Any union that failed to meet that 60 percent threshold faced a decertification vote.
Following the passage of SB256, the Freedom Foundation went after the state’s largest teachers’ union, the United Teachers of Dade, and financed a multi-million-dollar campaign to decertify the union and replace it with one that would be more friendly to their interests.
That campaign failed, and the teachers in Miami-Dade voted to keep their union, with 83% voting for UTD, 14% voting for the Freedom Foundation-backed alternative, and 3% voting to have no union at all.
In the three years since SB 256 passed, there have been 209 decertification votes against teacher unions across the state, and in all 209 cases, the teachers voted overwhelmingly to keep their union.
In response to these repeated losses, DeSantis and the Freedom Foundation moved this year to push SB 1296, which rewrites the rules for those union elections. Under the original version of the bill, the union doesn’t just have to win a majority of the people who decide to vote – they would now be required to have a majority of every employee in the collective bargaining unit.
Supporters say similar laws are in effect in Wisconsin and Iowa, although the Wisconsin measure was recently ruled unconstitutional.
During a heated and prolonged debate, the bill was watered down slightly on the floor of the Senate. It was amended to require 50% participation in the union election and then a majority of those who voted.
The bill passed, but three Republican senators from Miami – Senators Ana Maria Rodriguez, Alexis Calatayud and Ileana Garcia – defied the governor and voted against the bill because they said it would hurt working people who are already struggling to survive.
Despite the changes, the bill will still make it easier to do away with government unions in Florida – especially teacher unions. The only unions excluded from the new law are the ones representing police and firefighters – the very unions that supported DeSantis and other Republicans.
DeSantis determined to rid state of unions
Republican lawmakers who spoke to CBS Miami said this bill targeting teacher unions was the governor’s highest priority this session.
Andrew Spar, the president of the Florida Education Association, which represents teacher unions across the state, decried the bill’s passing.
“I think it’s unfortunate that lawmakers in the state of Florida have decided to stand with out-of-state billionaire-backed organizations rather than the people of the state of Florida, the workers of the State of Florida,” Spar told CBS Miami. “Every day, workers in this state are struggling to pay their bills, to pay increasing rent costs and housing costs, and now soaring gas prices. And all we ask for is a fair shot at the American dream. It seems like this bill’s main goal is to take away the protections that we have at work and our ability, our constitutional right and freedom to come together and advocate through a union and have a contract that protects our families and us.”
Critics of the bill argue that the attacks on the teacher unions are part of a broader education strategy that has slowly been unfolding for the past 30 years.
And when you look at those efforts, critics argue, there has been a methodical march toward one goal – privatizing education and eliminating most, if not all, traditional public schools.
It started under Jeb Bush, who launched the first charter schools in the late 1990s, and included so-called opportunity scholarships for poor minority students in failing schools.
But those efforts have now metastasized into what we see today – an explosion of poorly regulated charter schools across the state, coupled with the massive, for-profit businesses that manage those schools.
And then of course there are the vouchers themselves.
In 2003, the spending on various forms of vouchers was approximately $86 million, according to state records.
Today, the state spends more than $4 billion of taxpayer money every year on vouchers, money that is given to families regardless of their economic need, money that now helps subsidize private and even religious schools.
“I would say that the ultimate goal of education policy in Florida is to eliminate public schools,” Diane Ravitch, an education historian, said. “Not completely, but to use them as a dumping ground for the kids who are not taking vouchers or going to charters.”
Ravitch was the under secretary of education in the George H W Bush Administration. A one-time conservative Republican, she initially supported vouchers and charter schools but now sees them as part of a larger effort to undermine traditional public education.
“What has happened over the years and as a result of the expansion of charters and now the expansion of vouchers is that it’s perfectly obvious that all the things that I hoped would come true didn’t come true,” she told CBS Miami. “Charters are not better than public schools. Many of them are worse. Many of them open and then close. Florida has the highest rate of charter school closures of any state in the country. I think there are now about 700 to 800 charters in Florida, but 400 charters have opened and closed or got the money to open and never did open. They’re fly-by-night, many of them.
“As for vouchers,” she continued. “They have been something of a disaster because instead of saving poor kids from failing schools, they’re now being offered as a subsidy for the upper middle class and the upper class so that instead of paying $30,000 a year in tuition [for a private school], the state is subsidizing them, giving them $9,000 to help pay for their tuition. It’s a huge drain from the public schools because the public schools are losing money that they can ill afford.
She claimed 70% of the kids now receiving vouchers never attended public schools.
“They’re going to the kids who are already enrolled in religious and private schools,” she said.
Ravitch said the reason DeSantis and others are targeting the teacher unions is that they are often the last line of defense in supporting traditional public schools.
“Teacher unions are the only organized force that fights for public schools,” she said. “If they can eliminate teacher unions, if they can cripple the teacher union so that they have no voice, that will help them the next time they want to pass more legislation that is even more harmful to public schools. This is simple politics. They just want to knock out the teacher unions because they fight for public schools.”
