The old arguments won’t work this time for United Teachers of Dade (UTD).
For a change, it isn’t the amen chorus in the mainstream media or the politicians bought and paid for with decades of union money UTD’s leaders have to convince. It’s the educators whose legitimate workplace concerns have consistently been ignored while the union used millions of their hard-earned dues dollars to line their own pockets and fund a diverse collection of failed liberal candidates and causes at the local and national level.
Even before conceding in mid-December what an independent audit had already confirmed − that less than 60% of those being represented by UTD thought enough of its services to actually pay for them − union president Karla Hernandez-Mats was in full cliché mode.
“Our collective strength will be the defense against these attacks,” she thundered. “And through our solidarity, we shall emerge victorious. The careers of our dedicated education workforce and the future of public education depend on our resilience and our unity.”
The perceived attack, of course, takes the form of a new law, Senate Bill 256, passed by the Florida legislature last summer that, among its other provisions, requires public employee unions to petition the state for a recertification election when their paid membership drops below 60% of the bargaining unit they claim to represent.
The Freedom Foundation has joined forces with a group of local teachers to create the Miami-Dade Education Coalition, an alternative to the national teachers’ union that exists exclusively to serve teachers, and not politics. For months the group has been driving down UTD’s membership by offering an alternative option.
While simultaneously, after a solid year of arm-twisting, the UTD has been purging the union’s membership rolls of inactive members and even bribing potential recruits with Amazon gift cards, she claimed to have bumped the number up to 58.4%.
But when UTD filed its annual registration with the state last month, it revealed UTD’s membership rate to be only 56%, indicating either that she was exaggerating UTD’s support or that the exodus has already begun in anticipation of the likely recertification election next year.
The only commodity less credible than the union’s numbers is its lamentations about having to justify its existence at all. Since its creation in 1974, UTD has been re-certified exactly never. Like a pope or Supreme Court justice, union officials believe they were appointed for life regardless of their standing with the rank and file.
They’re in for a revelation.
Predictably, Hernandez-Mats and other apologists for Big Labor characterize the current struggle as an invasion by out-of-state aggressors. But in reality, it is a civil war between the union and its own members, justifiably dissatisfied with the union’s misplaced priorities.
And with good reason. Last year alone, UTD − which is affiliated with both of the nation’s two large teachers’ unions, the National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers, and the AFL-CIO − spent 46% of its gross dues revenue on affiliation fees.
Based on annual dues of $984.60 per full-time teacher, UTD diverts almost half − an estimated $453 per year − to organizations that have no direct connection with their unique concerns.
Of the remaining balance, once you account for what UTD itself spends on local politics, the six or eight union officers earning in excess of $200,000 a year, lavish office space and overhead, plus first-class travel and other incidentals, the union is left with only a pittance to spend on its own members.
And it isn’t just guilt by association. Hernandez-Mats herself was Democrat Charlie Christ’s running mate in his failed 2020 run for governor against DeSantis, effectively eroding her claims to prioritize union business over partisan politics.
Indignant media projections about the looming certification election assume that even if UTD’s paid membership stands at 56%, it still has a comfortable margin because it only takes a simple majority to be reinstated. But that’s an apples-and-oranges comparison.
December’s audit tabulated the soft support of thousands of teachers who believed there was nothing they could do to prevent their paychecks from being preemptively lightened by nearly $1,000 a year. The certification election, however, will gauge how many actually want that relationship to continue and how many would rather see UTD disqualified and replaced with a newer, cheaper, less-political, more-accountable alternative.
The election won’t be about outside forces, faceless corporate interests or the usual labor boogeymen. It will be a referendum on UTD’s 50-year record of corruption, incompetence and indifference.
If that’s what you had to stake your future on, you’d be desperate, too.
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Aaron Withe is CEO of the Freedom Foundation.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the Daily Wire.
Correction: A previous version of this article stated the Freedom Foundation joined forces with a group of local teachers to create the United Teachers of Dade. They helped create the Miami-Dade Education Coalition, not the United Teachers of Dade. The article has been updated to reflect the change.