basquebromance
Diamond Member
- Nov 26, 2015
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- #1
Ron DeSantis’s crusade against “woke ideology” was always a thinly disguised assault on the rights of Florida teachers and their unions. His recent “Teacher’s Bill of Rights” only makes it explicit.
say you’re a politician angling for the White House while trying to pursue what would be a deeply unpopular campaign against teachers and unions. How do you do it without losing the ability to posture as pro-worker? Or without alienating the disaffected independents and even liberal-leaning voters who you’ll eventually want to peel off?
DeSantis’s “anti-woke” legislation has often ended up not so much curtailing wokeness (which even his office can’t seem to define), as much as it has undermined the basic workplace and constitutional rights of teachers — say, by denying their most basic right of self-expression under threat of firing, or muzzling their teaching, which one Florida judge already flatly ruled violated the First Amendment.
Sure, this often bigoted agenda isn’t particularly popular either. But it’s not quite as politically toxic as picking a fight with a group of workers who polling shows most Americans like and believe deserve better pay, including in Florida.
Now DeSantis is taking this campaign to the next level, more explicitly targeting teachers’ unions with his misleadingly named Teacher’s Bill of Rights, in what DeSantis’s office paints as legislation to “protect teachers from overreaching school unions,” and what Fox News frames as an assault on “union bosses” — a favorite term for corporate “populists” who want to weaken worker power without looking like obvious hypocrites.
DeSantis has put forward a slate of measures under the rubric of “paycheck protection” that are meant to make life much harder for unions in the already anti-union state: mandated reminders that teachers don’t have to join a union and how much it costs if they do, no handing out union literature at work, and no automatic deduction of union dues from paychecks, to name a few. That last one is particularly menacing in a state where, as of 2018, unions get officially disqualified from collective bargaining if less than 50 percent of their members don’t pay dues.
DeSantis would also bump up the requirement for unions to represent at least 50 percent of eligible employees to 60 percent, a provision that seems clearly motivated by the fact that the United Teachers of Dade — whose former president was his recent opponent’s running mate — has a 50.7 percent representation rate. More menacingly, the outline also proposes annual audits for unions, and allows state investigations into them over not just allegations of fraud, but the much broader and more easily politically massaged causes of “waste and abuse.”
This is why corporate-funded politicians like DeSantis have an ideological commitment to weakening unions, given the fact that their financiers view unions as one of the chief threats to their power and wealth. But there are also practical, political reasons that DeSantis himself specifically sees these attacks on teachers’ unions as a priority.
With Florida’s Democrats in a shambles, its teachers’ unions are one of the only remaining institutions that can mount a political challenge to someone like DeSantis, and in a state that has successfully cut the legs out from under workers’ ability to unionize no less. As the right-wing Manhattan Institute has griped, “despite the fact that Florida’s teachers’ unions operate at a comparative disadvantage” to those in some liberal states, “they appear to more than overcome the dual headwinds of on-cycle elections and a more conservative-friendly electorate,” with union-backed candidates hitting at least a 60 percent win-rate in all but one election before 2022. In fact, unions’ ability to win school board elections may well have motivated the provisions in DeSantis’s “Teacher’s Bill of Rights” shortening school board term limits by four years.
DeSantis is clearly a canny politician, but there’s no guarantee his latest salvo against teachers and their unions will work at a time when both unions and teachers are enjoying historic favorability. Wherever the chips fall, no one should talk about DeSantis’s efforts in the state as if they’re part of some war against wokeness. This is an anti-worker crusade, pure and simple.
jacobin.com
say you’re a politician angling for the White House while trying to pursue what would be a deeply unpopular campaign against teachers and unions. How do you do it without losing the ability to posture as pro-worker? Or without alienating the disaffected independents and even liberal-leaning voters who you’ll eventually want to peel off?
DeSantis’s “anti-woke” legislation has often ended up not so much curtailing wokeness (which even his office can’t seem to define), as much as it has undermined the basic workplace and constitutional rights of teachers — say, by denying their most basic right of self-expression under threat of firing, or muzzling their teaching, which one Florida judge already flatly ruled violated the First Amendment.
Sure, this often bigoted agenda isn’t particularly popular either. But it’s not quite as politically toxic as picking a fight with a group of workers who polling shows most Americans like and believe deserve better pay, including in Florida.
Now DeSantis is taking this campaign to the next level, more explicitly targeting teachers’ unions with his misleadingly named Teacher’s Bill of Rights, in what DeSantis’s office paints as legislation to “protect teachers from overreaching school unions,” and what Fox News frames as an assault on “union bosses” — a favorite term for corporate “populists” who want to weaken worker power without looking like obvious hypocrites.
DeSantis has put forward a slate of measures under the rubric of “paycheck protection” that are meant to make life much harder for unions in the already anti-union state: mandated reminders that teachers don’t have to join a union and how much it costs if they do, no handing out union literature at work, and no automatic deduction of union dues from paychecks, to name a few. That last one is particularly menacing in a state where, as of 2018, unions get officially disqualified from collective bargaining if less than 50 percent of their members don’t pay dues.
DeSantis would also bump up the requirement for unions to represent at least 50 percent of eligible employees to 60 percent, a provision that seems clearly motivated by the fact that the United Teachers of Dade — whose former president was his recent opponent’s running mate — has a 50.7 percent representation rate. More menacingly, the outline also proposes annual audits for unions, and allows state investigations into them over not just allegations of fraud, but the much broader and more easily politically massaged causes of “waste and abuse.”
This is why corporate-funded politicians like DeSantis have an ideological commitment to weakening unions, given the fact that their financiers view unions as one of the chief threats to their power and wealth. But there are also practical, political reasons that DeSantis himself specifically sees these attacks on teachers’ unions as a priority.
With Florida’s Democrats in a shambles, its teachers’ unions are one of the only remaining institutions that can mount a political challenge to someone like DeSantis, and in a state that has successfully cut the legs out from under workers’ ability to unionize no less. As the right-wing Manhattan Institute has griped, “despite the fact that Florida’s teachers’ unions operate at a comparative disadvantage” to those in some liberal states, “they appear to more than overcome the dual headwinds of on-cycle elections and a more conservative-friendly electorate,” with union-backed candidates hitting at least a 60 percent win-rate in all but one election before 2022. In fact, unions’ ability to win school board elections may well have motivated the provisions in DeSantis’s “Teacher’s Bill of Rights” shortening school board term limits by four years.
DeSantis is clearly a canny politician, but there’s no guarantee his latest salvo against teachers and their unions will work at a time when both unions and teachers are enjoying historic favorability. Wherever the chips fall, no one should talk about DeSantis’s efforts in the state as if they’re part of some war against wokeness. This is an anti-worker crusade, pure and simple.
Gov. Ron DeSantis sworn in for second term, calls Florida a 'citadel of freedom'
Gov. Ron DeSantis defended Florida families, law enforcement and parental rights, while seeking "normalcy, not philosophical lunacy."
www.usatoday.com
For Workers, Hospitals Have Become the New Steel Mills — Minus the Strong Unions
Health care workplaces have replaced steel mills and auto plants as the nation’s big employers. But while industrial workers once had mighty unions, hospital workers have struggled by comparison to win representation and good contracts.
jacobin.com
