School teachers protest for higher wages at a Miami-Dade School Board meeting. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
A federal judge has ruled that part of Florida’s 2023 law restricting union organizing by state and local employees is unconstitutional, saying it unreasonably impairs collective bargaining agreements, granting a partial win in a lawsuit filed by education unions.
U.S. District Court Judge Mark Walker ruled that public teacher union members in Pinellas and Hernando counties had been damaged by the Florida Public Employees Relations Commission after the passage of SB 256, which had a component banning payroll deductions for the purpose of paying dues.
Hernando United School Workers and the Pinellas Classroom Teachers Association argued that prohibiting payroll deductions was unconstitutional, violated their right to be free from the state impairment of contracts.
The state argued the law was necessary to promote transparency and “allow union members to decide how to pay their dues and understand how much they were paying.”
Unions responded that transparency was not the purpose of the ban on payroll deductions.
“Instead, Plaintiffs say, the payroll deduction ban was enacted for the purpose of ending the State’s involvement in collecting and dispersing union dues,” Walker wrote.
“Notably, in their trial brief, Plaintiffs provide the context surrounding the statements that the PERC Defendants pulled from the legislative record, which tends to show that the payroll deduction ban was motivated by this disentanglement philosophy.”
The unions challenged three elements of the law in a lawsuit filed in 2023. Walker dismissed arguments against the other two features of the law, a required recertification process if union membership drops below 60% and a required membership authorization form.
The law applies to public employee unions – save police and firefighter unions, some of the governor’s biggest supporters.
The governor has publicly insulted education unions.
This has not been the only legal complaint against the law. The United Faculty of Florida filed suit against the Public Employee Relations Commission in September over the required recertification process.
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‘Unreasonable’
Walker ruled that employees who entered the collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) understood the terms, and so it would be “unreasonable to substantially impair these agreements.”
“The ‘problem’ to be resolved here — i.e., providing for payroll deductions to collect union dues — was a statutory right when the existing CBAs were negotiated,” Walker wrote in an opinion issued this week.
“All parties were aware of the existence of payroll deductions as a potential term in their CBAs. Presumably, the parties were also aware of alternatives to payroll deductions at that time. Given this knowledge at the time the existing CBAs were negotiated, and absent an unanticipated change in circumstances, it is unreasonable to substantially impair these agreements before their expiration by nullifying an express term of each agreement.”
Other unions were in on the suit – the Alachua County Education Association, United Faculty of Florida, and United Faculty of Florida at the University of Florida – but their arguments were moot because their contracts expired before the ruling was issued.
“Setting aside the Plaintiffs whose claims are now moot, the injuries of the remaining Union Plaintiffs with CBAs — namely, Lafayette Education Association, Pinellas Classroom Teachers Association, and Hernando United School Workers — are fairly traceable to the PERC Defendants,” Walker wrote. He said the injuries are also traceable to their employers.
The Lafayette Education Association, another plaintiff in the case, was dismissed for lack of standing.
Florida Education Association President Andrew Spar celebrated the ruling.
“When SB 256 went into law, we knew that the goal was to disrupt the constitutional right our teachers and education staff professionals have to be represented by a union,” Spar said in a news release.
“This ruling reaffirms that collective bargaining agreements are contracts that need to be respected. Over and over again Governor DeSantis and anti-worker, anti-public education politicians have tried to dismantle our teachers’ unions. And over and over again teachers, staff, students, parents and communities have come together to reaffirm their support for educators and for public education.”
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