The Florida Education Association (FEA) lost more than 20,000 members during the 2023-24 school year, according to a new federal disclosure filed by the teachers union.

In its annual Form LM-2 filed in November with the U.S. Department of Labor (USDOL), the FEA disclosed having 111,133 employed, dues-paying members as of August 31, 2024, down from the 131,510 “active members” the union reported a year earlier.

The precipitous decline far exceeds typical annual fluctuations in the union’s membership numbers and comes in the wake of Florida policymakers’ adoption of a package of government union reforms in 2023 championed by Gov. Ron DeSantis with the support of the Freedom Foundation and other conservative groups.  

Most significantly, Senate Bill 256: (1) prohibited government employers from deducting union dues from public employees’ paychecks; and (2) provided that, if fewer than 60 percent of the public employees represented by a union were members in any given year, the union would lose its state certification unless it received the support of a majority of employees voting in a secret-ballot election.

According to state records compiled by a Florida NPR affiliate, at least 54 “bargaining units” consisting of 63,400 public employees have decertified their union since the implementation of SB 256. Reportedly, only 3,000 of these employees were dues-paying union members at the time of the union’s decertification. In one bargaining unit of 26,500 state employees, the union was acting as the sole and exclusive voice of all employees in the bargaining unit for employment matters even though only 800 employees were actually union members. In effect, SB 256 put an end to dozens of zombie unions that continued to exist without meaningful support from employees.

In another 200 bargaining units, union membership is below 60 percent and the union is petitioning for/awaiting a recertification election to be conducted by the Florida Public Employees Relations Commission (PERC).

So far, however, no bargaining units represented by an FEA affiliate have lost their certification—a fact proudly noted by the teachers union. But while public school educators have yet to move as a bloc to ditch FEA, the union’s latest LM-2 indicates many individual teachers have decided to forego FEA membership since SB 256 ended automatic payroll deduction of union dues from their paychecks.

Getting government to collect dues for them via payroll deduction is a top priority for government unions. The National Education Association (NEA), for instance—the largest teachers union in the country and one of FEA’s two parent affiliates—encourages its affiliates to, through law or collective bargaining, “require the employer to deduct dues” and describes payroll deduction of dues as “essential” to a “strong union contract.”

Unions prefer government-administered payroll deduction of union dues because it frees them from bearing the administrative costs associated with collecting members’ dues payments—such as credit card processing fees or creating and managing systems to handle electronic payments. Instead, payroll deduction offloads the workload and costs of dues collection to public employees and taxpayer-funded payroll systems.

More importantly, though, government-run dues collection also facilitates coercive union membership solicitations, up to and including outright forgery. With payroll deduction, unions do not need to ask for or obtain employees’ bank account or credit card information; to get paid, all a union must do is get an employee to sign a membership form or, in some cases, sign it for them. Freedom Foundation attorneys have represented nearly 20 unionized public employees from West Coast states whose signatures have been forged on union membership forms by union organizers in recent years, triggering dues deductions from their paychecks by their government employers.

Lastly, payroll deduction of union dues enables union policies which sharply limit an employee’s ability to cancel their membership to arbitrary annual escape periods.

While unions strenuously oppose efforts to end government collection of union dues, even they admit that paying dues directly to the union is no imposition for those employees who truly wish to join.

In FEA’s case, the union has created an “eDues” mechanism for teachers to join the union and pay their dues via credit card or bank withdrawal. FEA describes its “eDues” system as “safe,” “secure,” “easy,” “private,” and “consistent.” It further notes, quite correctly, that “eDues work the same way you use online banking to pay other bills, membership or subscriptions.” FEA even goes so far as to argue that eDues is superior to payroll deduction since “[p]aying union dues via bank transfer allows members to keep their union membership private from [school] administrators.”

Given the ease of paying dues directly to FEA, the only explanation for the sharp decline in membership is that the loss of payroll deduction made it more difficult for FEA to deceive or strong-arm educators into signing up for membership.

Though not all public employees unions must filed disclosures with the USDOL, other government unions in Florida have reported even larger membership declines since passage of SB 256 than FEA has.

For example, Council 79 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) reported losing more than 6,000 members from December 2022 to December 2023, a decline of more than 36 percent in a single year.

Similarly, the Service Employees International Union affiliate in Florida focused primarily on representing public-sector workers saw its membership drop by one-third from December 2022 to December 2023.

Among them, FEA, AFSCME Council 9 and the SEIU Florida Public Services Union posted a cumulative, year-to-year, post-SB 256 membership decline of 28,522.

SB 256 wasn’t perfect, and more work needs to be done to ensure Florida taxpayers aren’t required to subsidize government union operations and activism and to secure meaningful choices for public employees when it comes to their union membership and representation.

But even just the loss of payroll deduction and the coercive practices associated with it has allowed government unions’ membership rate to start declining towards its natural, unsubsidized level. That union membership has fallen so far, so fast without it is a testament to just how reliant public-sector unions have become on government backing and support.