By Christopher Robé
April 28th, 2026
Greetings from the Swamp.
Florida has been the bellwether for the past five years regarding attacks against public education and public sector unions. Course curricula have been attacked, subject matter censored, and diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives defunded by reactionary state legislators who view anything challenging their narrow worldview in the most paranoid of terms. But the full impact of such reactionary laws have been held at bay in part because Florida has strong union representation for both the K-12 and higher education teachers with Florida Education Association and United Faculty of Florida serving as two leading players.
As a result, public sector unions have been likewise under attack here in our swampy state. In 2023, SB 256 was signed into law, which forbade payroll dues deduction for public sector unions as well as requiring that such unions have 60% membership or they face yearly recertification. The elimination of automatic dues deduction essentially dropped all union members thereby forcing every union chapter to start from scratch and re-sign up previous members as well as focusing on new ones. (Firefighters and the police were exempted from the law, a clear divide-and-conquer strategy by the state to offer preferential treatment to a certain sector of workers that they see as more in alignment with their politics than others.)
At Swamp University where I teach, the loss of automatic payroll dues deduction meant that our chapter that once had 57% membership before the law went into effect, now had to scramble to sign up all our old members once again while also trying to build new membership. Due to high turnover at our university, challenges with older members navigating the new electronic dues paying system initiated by our union affiliate, and the absence of many faculty being on campus in-person after the pandemic, we have only been able to reach around 48% membership so far.
Despite many of our education union chapters being under 60% membership, most of them successfully recertified since the law went into effect. Sadly, the same cannot be said for thousands of municipal and county employees along with non-instructional staff at public colleges and universities. Given that teachers were supposed to be the primary target of such anti-union legislation, the state has recently passed an even more reactionary anti-union law that requires 50% of employees within a bargaining unit to vote in a recertification election. Anyone who does not vote in the election is considered a “no” vote rather than an abstention, a rule that doesn’t apply to any other form of voting at the local, state, or federal level. Prior to this, a union needed over 50% of those voting to recertify its chapter. (Once again, fire fighters and the police are exempted.)
The law is expected to go into effect July 1st when our head conquistador Gov. DeSantis signs the bill. Transit and health care workers have voiced their concerns about how the loss of union representation will negatively impact them and their customers. For example, nurses have negotiated nurse-to-patient ratios in their contract to ensure quality health care. Transit workers have prevented the state from requiring them from wearing body cameras, which jeopardizes the privacy of all passengers. Jodi Fiddia, a bus driver from Ocala, best summarized the frustration public sector workers felt towards the Florida legislature: “If you want to help other public service workers like me, figure out how to make home ownership easier and more affordable. Whatever it is you choose to do to support public service workers, this bill should not be one of them.”
But, of course, our swamp state legislature doesn’t have public sector workers’ interests at heart because it takes its marching orders from the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which provided model language for bills that attack public education and public sector unions. According to Issac Kamola, “Of the nineteen sponsors of Florida’s HB 7 (“Stop WOKE bill”), at least eleven have connections to ALEC, many of whom sit on prominent ALEC committees” (43). Despite over 150 public sector workers travelling to Tallahassee to protest against the most recent law, the legislature voted in favor of it despite some Republicans breaking ranks and opposing it.
Public sector unions have always been in the crosshairs for several decades. In 1981, President Ronald Reagan fired over 11,000 air traffic controllers who were on strike, a controversial move that one could argue air traffic controllers still haven’t recovered from as they remain understaffed and suffer serious mental health issues from workplace anxiety. But it was difficult to demonize public sector unions during the 1980s and 1990s since its members belonged to beloved professions like teachers, fire fighters, and nurses.
But the Great Recession in 2008 provided a new opportunity as previously privileged and secure white workers found themselves in increasingly precarious financial positions and resenting those who weren’t. Abandoned by their jobs, cast from state support, and underwater in their mortgages, the newly precarious segments of the white workforce can be mobilized behind anti-statist rhetoric that casts public sector unions as leeches draining taxpayer money and jeopardizing principles like freedom of association and choice. In education, for example, “parental choice” has become a buzzword in terms of regulating curriculum, supporting charter schools, and defunding public education.
According to Daniel Martinez Hosang and Joseph E. Lowndes in their book Producers, Parasites, Patriots: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity (2019), “The logic of anti-statism has become so pervasive, and its success against everything from busing to affirmative action to welfare so thorough, its advocates have begun to turn it against new targets,” like public sector unions (28). Anti-statist rhetoric redeploys its racist stigmas once used against working-class communities of color to new sectors of previously privileged communities like working-class whites and public sector unions.
Unions are now reviled as parasites supporting lazy workers holding unwarranted public benefits all at the expense of taxpayers. The Freedom Foundation recently published an article, “Ending Taxpayer Support for Union Activity in Florida,” in celebration of the recent anti-union bills passed in our state. The article claims that it has no issue with public sector unions “so long as they do it with their own funds derived from voluntary membership freely purchased by the union’s members,” which is indeed the case in our swamp state where no union membership is mandatory. The article then goes on to mischaracterize a series of union benefits like release time from work for union duties and the use of government facilities and resources as “taxpayer funded” activities, a dubious proposition given that student tuition provides a revenue stream close to that of state funding for most state universities. But as Hosang and Lowndes note, those castigated as parasites have very little correlation with being nonproductive members of society. Instead, such terms are ideological constructions used to delegitimize their worth and work.
Our swamp state is the perfect illustration of this upside-down logic. Nurses, teachers, transit workers, and government employees have their unions threatened because its members and leaders are considered deadbeats skimming off taxpayer money and hoarding government resources. Meanwhile, the Hope Florida Foundation, a charity tied our state conquistador’s wife, Casey DeSantis, has been under investigation for over a year for receiving $10 million of funds from a Medicaid vendor that might have violated state law. More recently, the Trump administration has targeted Florida as the site of massive Medicaid fraud.
Public sector unions, meanwhile, are strategizing how to maintain their existence. Many are planning for aggressive organizing campaign this upcoming year to build over 60% membership and readying themselves to get out a majority “yes” vote for recertification if needed. There is also talk about trying to push back against such legislation through a public referendum. South Florida AFL-CIO’s president Jeffrey Mitchell observes, “Right now, the popularity of unions among people form 25 to 45 is about 70%. We need to capitalize on that.” This aligns with Eric Blanc’s research in We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big (2025) that Gen Z and Millennials show strong support for labor unions. “By 2025,” according to Blanc, “Millennials and Zoomers will make up over 54 percent of the US workforce, and by 2030 this number will go up to about 66 percent” (242).
At places like Swamp University where I work, we witness similar demographic shifts occurring with our workforce. As someone who has been recruiting faculty for our union for over fifteen years, I can attest to the relative ease we have in recruiting new hires compared to those who were hired prior to the Great Recession. The goal is to not only recruit these new hires into the union but to also start mobilizing them and long-term members in the fight to maintain our union and protect the integrity of academic freedom and due process, which are on the ropes in Florida but not yet knocked out.
This is also a call out to all those with unions to strengthen your union’s infrastructure and capacity building and those without unions to build one on your campus. The American Association of University Professors offers some valuable organizing assistance on its website as it has been growing its chapters rapidly across the United States. Having a union is one of the best ways to protect your campus against the attacks against public higher education that have been flaring up across the country as well as creating stronger community and protecting democracy.
