Starting Tuesday, public school teachers in one of the country’s largest school districts began voting on whether to keep their current union—a longstanding local affiliate of a national teachers union—or join a newly formed employee organization that has the financial backing of a notorious anti-union advocacy group.
The vote is a test case for a novel experiment: whether a group dedicated to dismantling public sector unions can successfully seed a competing union. If it works, some worry that existing unions may be forced to ward off expensive and time-consuming copycat efforts elsewhere.
The Freedom Foundation, a right-wing group based in Washington state, is financing and promoting the new employee organization in Florida. Called the Miami-Dade Education Coalition (MDEC), it was founded to compete with the longstanding teachers’ labor union, United Teachers of Dade (UTD), an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT).
The Freedom Foundation’s latest effort in Florida is tied to the right’s goal of busting unions throughout the country as a way of defunding progressive political campaigns, starting with those representing public sector employees.
The story began in spring 2023 with SB 256, a bill passed by the Florida legislature that raised the membership threshold for certain public sector unions to 60%. Under the new law, if less than 60% of eligible members have signed up for the union, it is vulnerable to automatic decertification.
Notably, the unions that were exempted from this new, higher membership threshold—representing corrections officers, police, and firefighters—all support Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who fought for the anti-union legislation.
“Tallahassee didn’t have a problem with unions playing politics as long as the politics were in favor of the governor and Republicans,” said Jim DeFede of CBS News Miami in an interview with an MDEC representative. “The unions that endorsed DeSantis got exempted from this bill.”
In the year since the law passed, more than 50,000 public employees have already lost union representation. Just this summer, all eight adjunct faculty unions at Florida’s public universities have been decertified.
The Miami-Dade teachers’ union avoided outright decertification by demonstrating a threshold of at least 30% interest from eligible members. However, their failure to reach the 60% threshold triggered the current election asking members to vote on which organization they want to represent them.
That’s where the Freedom Foundation comes in. After lobbying for the bill, the organization has been working for the past year and a half to get teachers in Miami-Dade County to choose its own pet organization, MDEC, over the UTD.
Ballots started to be mailed out Tuesday, according to the Public Employees Relations Commission (PERC). Teachers have until September 24 to cast their votes.
“Unlike UTD, MDEC’s founding principles protect our independence from outside affiliations,” the organization contends. “MDEC is its own legal entity, and no outside organization has control over our local union.”
According to an FAQ on its website, MDEC insists that it is accepting “outside resources” from the Freedom Foundation “solely for the duration of the campaign.”
Last month, the Freedom Foundation brought together public school teachers from across the country to teach them how to decertify their unions and keep “the socialist dogma of their leadership [out of] our children’s classrooms.”
MDEC filed for registration with the state labor board last October, and received approval in February; one of the signatories on behalf of MDEC was Allison Beattie, the Freedom Foundation’s director of labor relations.
Another signatory was Matthew Hargraves, who previously served as an attorney for an unaffiliated teachers union in Florida—Santa Rosa Professional Educators, which broke away from the Florida Education Association.
In January, MDEC held a press conference to reiterate that it’s a legitimate union.
The president and co-founder is Brent Urbanik. In an interview with CBS News Miami, he agreed that the Freedom Foundation is “bankrolling” MDEC but did not disclose how much money the foundation has spent on the effort. Instead, he confirmed that it is paying for all of the mailings, canvassers, and legal expenses involved in getting the alternative “local union” off the ground.
Urbanik insisted that “Freedom Foundation is not necessarily anti-union.”
The other co-founder is Shawn Beightol, who ran for UTD president twice. Media reports have claimed that the Freedom Foundation proposed the idea of an alternative union, which has been corroborated by CBS News Miami.
“The think tank proposed replacing these entrenched, agenda-driven unions with local-only ones that focused on local issues [and] Miami-Dade educators were ‘elated’ with the idea,” according to The Lion.
The Freedom Foundation’s latest effort in Florida is tied to the right’s goal of busting unions throughout the country as a way of defunding progressive political campaigns, starting with those representing public sector employees. These coordinated attacks—bankrolled by billionaires—largely culminated in the 2018 Janus Supreme Court decision, which ruled that public employees are not required to pay for the costs of union representation.
Since the Janus decision, the Freedom Foundation has pushed state-level legislation that makes it harder for teachers to pay union dues, used what some union leaders have called “federal mail fraud” to trick members into leaving their unions, and aggressively pursued access to personal information in order to contact union members directly with anti-union campaign materials.
