United Teachers of Dade wins recertification by landslide, crushing competing union group

Public school teachers in Miami-Dade have voted overwhelmingly to keep their current collective bargaining group and rejected another organization that received major funding from an author of Florida’s relatively new anti-union law.

United Teachers of Dade (UTD), which has represented teachers across the county since 1974, won recertification with 83% of the vote.

The union beat out another entity called the Miami-Dade Education Coalition, which got financial help from the union-busting Freedom Foundation.

“We always knew UTD would win!” UTD President Karla Hernández-Mats said in a statement shortly after voters were tallied Wednesday.

“We proudly celebrate our victory against these deceptive anti-worker tactics. This win reflects the power of unity and commitment to workers’ rights. Unions matter and our strength is evident.”

The GOP-dominated Legislature last year pushed through a bill (SB 256) requiring teachers, nurses and some other public sector workers to write checks to pay their union dues rather than have it drawn directly from their paychecks.

The measure, which lawmakers updated this year to exempt some emergency and mass transit workers, also mandated that if a union didn’t have at least 60% membership in a given district, it had to reapply yearly for certification.

While signing the earlier bill, for which the Freedom Foundation claimed significant credit, Gov. Ron DeSantis said part of what drove the change was that school unions in particular had “become very partisan.”

“That’s not what schools are about,” he said.

Not one to let irony obstruct him, DeSantis endorsed a slate of Republican candidates for School Boards across the state ahead of this year’s Primary and backed more than 30 such candidates in 2022. He also signed the bill by Republican Reps. Spencer Roach and Tyler Sirois in June 2023 that placed on this year’s General Election ballot Amendment 1, which would make School Board races partisan.

A UTD press note called Wednesday’s election “unnecessary” and a “waste of taxpayer dollars” and SB 256 “anti-worker legislation.”

“Despite the campaign to discredit and disinform the public on what UTD does,” American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten said in a statement, “today’s vote shows that the educators of Miami-Dade County Public Schools know they’re stronger when they’re in a real union.”

That was a slight against the Miami-Dade Education Coalition, which formed with the expressed intention of taking out UTD. The group’s President, public school teacher Brent Urbanik, told POLITICO early this month — as ballots awaited counting in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene — that UTD had lost its local focus by getting too involved in politics.

Hernández-Mats was Charlie Crist’s running mate in the 2022 Governor’s race. UTD has endorsed several candidates for partisan offices in this year’s election, nearly all of them Democrats.

The American Federation of Teachers, with which UTD is affiliated, donated $500,000 to Crist’s gubernatorial campaign and has made huge contributions to a plethora of Democratic candidates across the country this cycle.

“The big problem here is the unions are not focusing on the things that matter to us all,” he said. “They are getting sidetracked with pet political projects.”