Jason Wallace joined more than a dozen Clearwater employees earlier this month to let City Council members know their demands. Dressed in red and black shirts promoting their union, they called for higher wages, better treatment and safer working conditions.
“I’ve worked for the city for 20 years,” Wallace, a member of Communications Workers of America Local 3179, told the council. “We still don’t have decent wage. The cost of living has skyrocketed. The people who make this city bright and beautiful ... have to fight for crumbs.”
But at the same time that Clearwater union workers are fighting for a better contract, a state law that went into effect July 1 is threating the existence of collective voices that negotiate everything from wages to workplace protections throughout Florida.
The law, SB 256, requires public sector unions to enroll at least 60% of eligible employees or risk decertification by the state. Local governments may no longer deduct monthly dues from paychecks, forcing unions to reenroll existing members in a new payment system and recruit any new members needed to meet the 60% threshold.
Gov. Ron DeSantis has said the law gives workers more control over their paychecks. But it exempts police, firefighters and correctional officers, leading many to criticize it as a politically-driven union buster for groups not aligned with the governor’s agenda.
“It’s being done to crush the unions,” said Stephen Simon, a city of Tampa wastewater treatment plant operator and president of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1464. “Everybody who voted against the governor is under fire.”
On Thursday, Communications Workers of America Local 3179 held a phone banking event with pizza at the union hall where members called fellow Clearwater employees to get them signed up in the new dues payment software. Joining them in the effort were organizers from the union’s national office, who visited city work sites earlier this month.
Local union president Ron Rice estimated that they had hit about 30% enrollment in Clearwater as of Friday.
The low participation, Rice said, could be a symptom of how the law worked in Florida before the new regulations. All eligible employees received the contract benefits that the union negotiated with city administration, even if they were not dues-paying members. But now unions have to reeducate workers about the importance of enrollment.
“They believed that if they didn’t have a dispute with management where they would need the union’s representation, they were fine to just reap the benefits of the contract,” Rice said. “Now they are realizing all those benefits can go away if we don’t meet these requirements from this union-busting bill.”