Happy Teacher Appreciation Week from Ron DeSantis!
The Republican Wrecking Crew Prevails in a Battle in Florida as their Allies in Congress Try to Win the War in Washington
By Jim Miller
Just in time for the annual symbolic effort to honor America’s teachers, the Florida Governor signed a draconian piece of legislation aimed at gutting their unions. As Portside reported:
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) said Tuesday that he signed a major piece of legislation aimed at weakening public sector unions by making it harder for them to collect dues from members.
Senate Bill 256 forbids most unions representing government employees from having dues deducted directly from workers’ paychecks. It also requires that affected unions maintain at least 60% membership in their bargaining units, or else they could face decertification and lose their contracts.
Although DeSantis and other Republicans have cast the bill as “paycheck protection” for workers, they excluded unions representing police, firefighters and corrections officers — i.e., the unions that are typically more likely to support Republicans. The unions that are subject to the law tend to represent teachers, sanitation workers and other government employees.
Importantly, this bill goes beyond the notorious Supreme Court Janus decision that eliminated public sector unions’ ability to collect a “fair share” from nonmembers who benefit from union contracts, allowing free riders to get negotiated salary, benefit, pension, and other workplace protections without contributing a thing.
Janus has forced those unions into perpetual survival organizing mode to maintain their membership in the face of this assault, and, despite much success in keeping members in public sector unions, it has hurt a large portion of the labor movement by compelling it to divert resources that could have been used to go on the offense by organizing other worksites or engaging in more robust political action. And that is precisely the point—to weaken what the right sees as a core element of the Democratic Party’s winning coalition.
This Florida legislation ups the ante by disallowing the common practice of collecting members’ dues though paycheck deductions and imposing a higher membership threshold, essentially a supermajority, for a union to maintain its status as the sole bargaining agent.
The tell here, as the Portside piece notes, is that unions like those representing the police, who are more likely to support Republicans, were exempted. Thus, DeSantis and the Republicans don’t even have a fig leaf to cover their nakedly political intent. It’s all about weakening the power of their political enemies and making the public sector and educational institutions in particular even more vulnerable to the seemingly endless culture war assaults on teachers and public education.
The destruction of collective bargaining in Florida would surely lead to lower pay, fewer benefits, and far less freedom in the workplace and classroom. Hence, we might have one of the largest states in the country see an even more pronounced exodus of qualified educators from the profession. For anyone who cares about quality education, this is deeply concerning, but if what you are all about is restricting free speech, academic freedom, and the honest discussion of ideas, then it’s great news. If you believe schools are the cornerstone of democracy, this is alarming, but if your political end is the destruction of the public sector, it’s time for a victory parade.
As dismaying as all of this is for those on the moderate to progressive side of our political divide, it should not be surprising in the least. Despite our nearly one-note obsession with the real damage Trump has inflicted on our democracy, this monomaniacal hatred of government in all forms has been with us for much of our contemporary history.
The extremists killing public education in Florida and the zealots trying to push the country over a financial cliff in the debt ceiling showdown in Washington D.C. are just the latest in a long line of corporate anarchists and Ayn Rand acolytes that reaches back to the Reagan era. That’s when Grover Norquist openly declared that the aim of the right was to shrink government down to the size where it could be drowned in a bathtub.
But an honest account of our political history should reach back even further to the godfathers of the age of the billionaire class that Nancy MacLean exposes in her seminal history Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for Democracy.
It was decades ago that those who always hated the New Deal and recoiled from the transformation of democracy brought by the Civil Rights Movement and other contemporary struggles for social justice sought to save capitalism from democracy, permanently. And they’ve been at it ever since, never ceasing in their efforts to kill unions, eliminate government regulations, reverse environmental protections, eviscerate progressive taxation on the rich and corporations, and more.
They just won another battle in Florida last week; we’ll see what the near future holds for the country as the lunatic edge of this historic movement to roll back the 20th century threatens to burn it all down.