Florida teachers raise alarm over bill requiring unions to show support from 50% of employees to remain certified<\/a><\/p>\nThe bill passed on a 25-14 vote, with five Republicans \u2013 Sens. Alexis Calatayud of Miami, Ileana Garcia of Miami, Ed Hooper of Clearwater, Ana Maria Rodriguez of Miami and Corey Simon of Tallahassee \u2013 joining Democrats voting against it. Independent Sen. Jason Pizzo of Sunny Isles Beach also voted against it.<\/p>\n
It requires at least 50 percent of eligible members of a bargaining unit to participate in a vote, and for a majority of those voting to approve it for a union to be recertified.<\/p>\n
Democrats argued it was part of a running effort to decimate teachers unions in Florida. Sen. Carlos Guillermo Smith, D-Orlando, pointed to a bill from 2023 that required unions to be recertified if they have fewer than 60 percent of eligible members paying dues.<\/p>\n
That bill triggered a series of recertification votes for unions across the state. <\/p>\n
\u201cThis is the next step in a campaign a yearslong campaign to eliminate public sector unions in Florida,\u201d Smith said. The bill \u201cis intended to be the kill shot to finish the job,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
Under the bill, police, firefighters and emergency medical technicians are exempt from the new rules, which opponents said is unfair and unconstitutional. <\/p>\n
But Martin said he was only trying to prevent unions from harming their members. He noted he filed the bill after the teachers union in his Lee County district filed suit over a plan to give higher pay to teachers who taught in failing schools.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe saw an opportunity to help kids in a failing school or a D school get teachers who wanted to teach in that school,\u201d Martin said.<\/p>\n
The bill now heads to the House for a vote.<\/p>\n
Copyright 2026 by WJXT News4JAX – All rights reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"TALLAHASSEE, Fla. \u2013 Unions representing teachers and other public sector workers \u2013 but not first responders \u2013 would…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":181543,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[1779,28,30,100,29,132,4030,71978],"class_list":{"0":"post-181542","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-florida","8":"tag-firefighters","9":"tag-florida","10":"tag-florida-headlines","11":"tag-florida-legislature","12":"tag-florida-news","13":"tag-police","14":"tag-teachers","15":"tag-unions"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181542","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=181542"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181542\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/181543"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=181542"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=181542"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=181542"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}