Posts tagged Florida Education Association
Governor DeSantis signs bill tightening rules for public sector unions
May 4, 2026 // It requires at least 50% of employees in a bargaining unit to participate in certification or re-certification elections. A majority of those voting must back the union. Police, firefighters, correctional officers, EMTs and other public-safety units are treated differently under the bill.
Commentary: Nilesh Umapathy: SB 1296 is about accountability — not anti-unionism
April 9, 2026 // The PERC ruling shows what happens when someone pushes back — the union is forced to open its books and cover the member’s legal costs after it tried to silence them. Critics of SB 1296 will no doubt raise concerns, but most will miss the point. This is not an anti-union coalition. LaBedz herself is not anti-union. She is a member who was punished for exercising her rights. This is a coalition demanding accountability.
Commentary: Florida Teachers Unions Have Lost Their Way
February 26, 2026 // If a union gets exclusive authority of a bargaining unit, it should be chosen by at least 50% of the employees. That's the principle behind House Bill 995 and Senate Bill 1296, now moving through the Florida Legislature.
Arkansas teachers union’s dues revenue drops 36 percent in one year
October 21, 2025 // A new Freedom Foundation analysis of tax returns filed by the Arkansas Education Association (AEA), the state teachers union and an affiliate of the Washington, D.C.-based National Education Association (NEA), shows a modest decline in AEA’s revenue from membership dues following the collective bargaining ban, but reveals a staggering 36 percent decline in union dues collection in the first full year following passage of SB 473. As a baseline, the AEA’s Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Form 990 tax return for the tax year ending August 31, 2020, reported nearly $2.4 million in revenue from membership dues.
Opinion: Government Unions Are Hemorrhaging Members. Here’s Why.
February 4, 2025 // The numbers tell a stark story. While overall union membership sits at 9.9%, Big Labor still maintains a stranglehold over public employees, 32.2% of whom are union members. Of the 14.3 million union members nationwide, half work in government jobs, with teachers unions alone accounting for nearly one-quarter of all union members.
Opinion:The Fall of Florida’s ‘Zombie Unions’
December 26, 2024 // The Florida Education Association (FEA), which represents teachers and school staff, has lost about 13% of its members since 2023, according to a review of federal data by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. That’s because members in several school districts voted not to recertify their chapters, allowing them to disband.
Florida teachers union loses 20,000 members after government stops collecting dues
December 4, 2024 // In its annual Form LM-2 filed in November with the U.S. Department of Labor (USDOL), the FEA disclosed having 111,133 employed, dues-paying members as of August 31, 2024, down from the 131,510 “active members” the union reported a year earlier. The precipitous decline far exceeds typical annual fluctuations in the union’s membership numbers and comes in the wake of Florida policymakers’ adoption of a package of government union reforms in 2023 championed by Gov. Ron DeSantis with the support of the Freedom Foundation and other conservative groups.
Judge finds Florida’s anti-union law union unconstitutional and ‘unreasonable’
November 12, 2024 // 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.”
Florida judge rejects a lawsuit challenging public-employee union restrictions
August 2, 2024 // Unions argued that the ban on withholding dues from paychecks would force them to use other, more-difficult methods to collect money from members. The membership authorization forms drew criticism, in part, because of wording required by the state that many union members found objectionable. Also, the changes required unions to be recertified as bargaining agents if fewer than 60 percent of eligible employees have submitted the membership authorization forms and paid dues. Plaintiffs in the lawsuit are the Florida Education Association, the United Faculty of Florida, unions representing employees of the Alachua County, Hernando County, Lafayette County and Pinellas County school districts and the University of Florida and UF professor Malini Schueller. Defendants are members of the Public Employees Relations Commission, members of the University of Florida Board of Trustees and the school boards in Alachua, Hernando and Pinellas counties.
After decades of corruption Florida teachers seek new union with integrity
February 25, 2024 // “I noted that the increase in union dues and health care costs were not matched by commensurate salary improvements,” Beightol said. “I began investigating what was going on.” Around the same time, former UTD president Pat Tornillo was arrested for swindling the union out of millions of dollars. Beightol unsuccessfully ran for president of UTD twice, before being expelled for “anti-union” behavior.