Last night the Pinellas Classroom Teacher’s Association held a phone bank to call teachers in an effort to help them retain their union memberships after Republican Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill last month banning automatic dues deductions from public employees’ paychecks. WMNF’s Josh Holton reports.
Tracey McConnell is the vice president of the Pinellas Classroom Teachers Association.
“They made it so that we can’t pay our dues out of our paycheck. And they also made it so that our membership has to be 60% in order for us to continue to have a union.”
After pushback from both teachers and the public about what detractors have called the “Don’t Say Gay” bill last year, and book bans, Governor Ron DeSantis, has been waging culture wars against those in opposition, such as Disney and teachers unions. Last month, he signed the bill to end automatic deductions from public employee unions. McConnell says DeSantis is making it easier for a union to get decertified, and that could adversely impact local teachers.
“And our contract is what allows us to make sure that we get good benefits through- for our health insurance. We have an 80/20 split that pays for our health insurance, like, the district pays for 80%. And we pay for 20%. If our contract was to go away, we would lose that we then would be responsible to pay for a lot more. And what a lot of teachers don’t know is that whenever we bargain for our salary, and we bargain for our health insurance, if we have no union, we’re gonna wind up spending a lot more for our health insurance, probably more than what we actually pay for dues.”
DeSantis argued it would give teachers more control over their paycheck. But McConnell said not one teacher she is aware of wants to stop the deductions.
“We know that we were having our dues taken out of our paycheck because it’s an option that we signed up for when we signed up for the Union, right? When we sign now in this process of signing over and switching over to E-dues. People are thankful to have the opportunity to switch over to E-dues but if for some chance they don’t want to have it pulled straight out of their bank account. There is no other option where they can pay locally at the office, like they can go and take a check there. But most people are choosing to switch over to E-dues.”
More than a dozen phone bankers showed up to make phone calls to educators in hopes that they can at least make sure they maintain enough local union support so that teachers will have the ability to continue bargaining collectively for better working conditions.
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