Aaron Withe of the Freedom Foundation wrote today about the efforts of teachers in Miami to decertify their union.
Aaron Withe of the Freedom Foundation wrote today about the efforts of teachers in Miami to decertify their union. United Teachers of Dade is a hyper-progressive union that is so involved in politics that its president was the Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor in the 2022 Florida gubernatorial election. Teachers, understandably, are sick of giving about $1,000 per year in dues to an organization that spends only a small fraction of that money on representing their interests in the workplace.
The Janus v. AFSCME decision in 2017 effectively made the entire public sector right-to-work, and many Miami teachers have opted to leave their union. Florida passed a new law this year (which NR endorsed) that says, among other things, that if a public-sector union represents less than 60 percent of the employees it bargains for, it can be subject to a recertification election.
Withe writes about UTD’s failed efforts to break that threshold:
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.
As Withe writes, teachers unions are “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.” If it’s doing such a great job and providing value for teachers, it should have no trouble retaining more than 60 percent of Miami teachers as members. It can’t even do that, and its efforts to manipulate the numbers have failed. Good for Miami teachers for wanting out.
It’s instructive to compare UTD with another major teachers’ union: the Chicago Teachers Union. The CTU is similarly progressive in its politics, and one of its former lobbyists, Brandon Johnson, is now mayor of Chicago after the union funded his campaign. The current president of the CTU, Stacy Davis Gates, removed her son from Chicago Public Schools and enrolled him in a private school, a choice the union opposes for low-income Chicagoans by opposing Illinois’s school-voucher program. The union spends only 17 percent of a teacher’s $1,242 per year in dues on representing teachers, with the rest going to activism and overhead. And Chicago students suffer, with massive spending increases never reaching the classroom, as evidenced by truly dreadful educational outcomes.
Since the Janus decision, Illinois teachers-union membership has declined by 23,000 employees. But Illinois’s legislature is run by Democrats, unlike Florida’s Republican majority. And Democratic governor J. B. Pritzker didn’t sign a law allowing recertification elections if membership drops below 60 percent like Republican governor Ron DeSantis did. So the avenue of escape available to Miami teachers and taxpayers doesn’t exist for Chicago teachers and taxpayers.
Efforts to decertify the teachers’ union in Miami are possible because conservatives won elections and passed a good law that limits public-sector unions’ power. States with conservative governments should follow Florida’s lead and pass similar laws. States with progressive governments will continue to struggle under the burden of unrepresentative teachers’ unions.