MIAMI SPRINGS, Fla. – There was a Labor Day tribute to workers and those in the trenches Monday at the United Teachers of Dade headquarters in Miami Springs.
And there was backlash over a new state law that puts guardrails on union membership and, for the first time in half a century, puts UTD up for a membership election for its very existence. The Broward Teachers Union is facing a similar predicament.
“Our membership knows exactly what they stand to lose and they will not allow us to lose that,” union president Karla Hernandez-Mats said.
The ballot was mailed to some 30,000 teachers and employees, giving them a choice of whether to keep UTD as their representative, have no union, or a new organization called Miami Dade Education Coalition, a new union funded by the politically-conservative group the Freedom Foundation, which helped write the law that makes it harder for Florida’s labor unions to exist.
MDEC’s president, Brent Urbanik, said, “We feel like there’s a lot of shell games that happen by the district that UTD essentially doesn’t really pursue.”
Local leadership recruited and funded by Freedom Foundation say they want to take politics out of the union, though its website outlines partisan conservative plans.
When asked if Freedom Foundation was putting millions behind MDEC in this effort, Urbanik replied, “Nothing — for them, it’s just aligning of same values on that one accord.”
Joy Jackson, a teacher at Robert Renick Education Center in Opa-locka, is skeptical of the competing union’s motives.
“Why would someone want to allow monies to come to them from an entity that is out to destroy unions?” she asked.
Results of the recertification are due Sept. 24. As of Labor Day, Miami-Dade teachers were working without a contract.