Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has signed Senate Bill 1296 into law, and the state's lawmakers have settled an issue that should never have been controversial: If a union claims the right to speak for every worker in a bargaining unit, it should be supported by a majority of its members.
Critics insist the bar is too high, but consider what's at stake. Under Florida law, a certified union is the recognized legal representative of every employee in the bargaining unit, whether those employees wanted it or not. Employees who think their union isn't doing its job can't give their business to a competitor. They can't bargain directly with their employer. They can't have anyone else in the room when they file a grievance. The union speaks for them, period.
Given that level of authority, the question isn't why we're requiring majority support; it's why we weren't requiring it already. The passage of SB 256 in 2023 started to provide an answer. That law required unions to demonstrate their dues-paying members amounted to at least 60% of employees. If not, unions were compelled to hold an election to become certified.
The results were damning. Several unions, representing more than 70,000 Florida employees, were decertified, not because they were targeted, but because they couldn't show they had meaningful support. Some were zombie unions: long inactive in practice but still recognized on paper as the exclusive legal representative, blocking workers from going anywhere else.
The problem was that unions were able to prevail in the subsequent elections with support from a small fraction of the workforce. At the University of South Florida, the United Faculty of Florida secured exclusive bargaining authority over 2,169 employees with 41 votes -- less than 2% of the workforce. At Florida A&M, three votes out of 202 eligible certified a union to represent all graduate assistants. In Seminole County, fewer than 25% of eligible instructional employees voted for recertification, but the union won anyway.
A handful of activists shouldn't control workplace representation for hundreds of employees who never asked for it. SB 1296 addresses that directly. Unions that maintain 60% dues-paying membership get recertified automatically -- no election required. That threshold is a genuine indicator of broad support, which is exactly why it triggers automatic recertification. But for unions that fall below it, the standard is simple: Win majority support from the people you claim to represent or don't presume to represent them.
The law also ends something that never had a principled defense: taxpayer-funded paid leave for union political activity. Public employees in Florida have been able to take paid time off to campaign, lobby, recruit members and attend press conferences on behalf of their unions -- all on the public's dime.
SB 1296 keeps paid leave for actual representation work -- contract negotiations and grievance proceedings -- which are the core functions unions exist to perform. Everything else comes out of unpaid leave or the employee's own accrued time. Workers can still voluntarily pool personal time off for colleagues doing union work, but taxpayers have no business funding partisan campaigns.
Unions with genuine support have nothing to worry about. The 60% threshold for automatic recertification is intentionally high. Clear it and they never see a ballot. These reforms matter only for unions that have drifted away from the workers they are supposed to serve.
What happened at USF and Florida A&M isn't an anomaly. It's the predictable consequence of a system that made unions easy to certify and nearly impossible to remove. Before SB 256, Florida law didn't require periodic recertification elections, and many public-sector unions remained in place for decades without facing a new vote.
The result was organizations that learned to sustain themselves on institutional inertia rather than actual worker support. Florida is done with that. A union that holds exclusive legal authority over a group of workers should be able to show they actually want it that way. That's what SB 1296 does, and it's long overdue.