Republicans don’t like teachers’ unions. They don’t like them for many reasons. The unions get a seat at the table when it’s time to bargain over wages, health care, pensions, and working conditions. They are the collective voice of working people. Republicans don’t want working people to have power.

Unions also are skewed toward Democrats, so killing unions hurts the Democrats.

The Florida legislature passed a law declaring that unions would be decertified if their membership was below 60% of the relevant workforce. The law is aimed at the teachers’ unions. The 60% cutoff is intended to block unions; in a normal democratic election, the winner needs to get 50% plus one, not 60%.

The Miami Herald reported:

Florida’s largest teachers union, United Teachers of Dade, will head down the path toward decertification if it cannot prove that hundreds more teachers began paying dues over the last week — an unprecedented situation that threatens to leave about 30,000 Miami-Dade public school teachers and personnel vulnerable to possible labor contract changes.

On Friday, to meet the requirements of a new state law that requires at least 60% of union members pay dues, Miami-Dade Public Schools was gauging how many eligible employees were union-paying members within UTD. The last tally — conducted on Nov. 10 — put that number at just 58.4%.

It was unclear Friday whether the 60% threshold would be met, and union leaders and district administrators were uncertain exactly what the future would hold if they fell short.

During a news conference Thursday night, Karla Herndandez-Mats was unable to detail what the potential ramifications could be as a result of submitting the audit. “We don’t know what it means, because we don’t know what the numbers will be tomorrow,” she said.

The potential collapse of the state’s largest teachers union could minimize the collective voice of educators in a state that has increasingly been hostile to teachers unions, and undercut them locally when they find themselves in need of collective representation.

Teachers unions have often been at the forefront of criticism toward the governor and Republicans over education policies. If the unions are decertified, it would mark the first wave of change from a law that went into effect July 1 and was criticized by union leaders and Democrats as a “union-busting” effort to silence critics.

Decertification would leave the union unable to bargain for things such as pay and protections in the classroom. Without that ability, Hernandez-Mats said, there would be “detrimental” effects and a “mass exodus of teachers” who are tired of political attacks. (The union successfully bargained for its members to receive pay raises ranging from 7% to 10% this school year.)

Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/article281987848.html#storylink=cpy