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Florida made public-sector unions more accountable — Oregon did the opposite

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by Aaron Withe, opinion contributor - 04/03/26 7:30 AM ET

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by Aaron Withe, opinion contributor - 04/03/26 7:30 AM ET

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AP Photo/Chris O'Meara, File

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R)

Florida’s legislature recently approved a bill designed to make public-sector unions more accountable to the government workers they represent.

If a union wants the exclusive legal right to represent every employee in a given bargaining unit — including workers who never joined or voted for the union, and never asked to be represented — it must show that a majority of those employees want its representation. And it isn’t enough to get a majority of ballots in a low-turnout workplace election. Rather, the union must show support from an absolute majority of the people it claims to speak for.

Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) is expected to sign the bill into law.

The legislation is just the latest effort to hold government employee unions accountable in a state that’s recently taken a number of such steps. In 2023, Florida passed a law requiring a recertification election for public-sector unions that fail to maintain the support of 60 percent of their dues-paying membership. What followed was revealing. Between June 2025 and January 2026, there were 218 such recertification elections in Florida. In 192 of them — 88 percent — fewer than half of eligible employees bothered to vote.

Under existing rules, the unions were certified anyway. For example, at the University of South Florida, exactly 41 employees out of 2,169 eligible cast votes for union representation. Nonetheless, the union now holds exclusive bargaining authority over all 2,169. At Florida A&M, three votes out of 202 eligible employees had the same effect. In one Broward County unit, two votes bound 51 employees to their union.

The new bill will change that.

The point isn’t that unions are illegitimate. It is that the current system never requires them to get the consent of the workers they represent. Already, since the 2023 law passed, more than 70,000 Florida public employees have decertified their unions in majority workplace elections. This is not because the law tilted the playing field against unions, but because the workers, when finally given a chance to decide for themselves, said they didn’t want the representation they had been assigned.

Unions will argue that low turnout doesn’t mean low support — that workers who don’t vote are effectively ratifying the status quo, and that requiring majority participation sets an unreasonably high bar. That is true to some extent. Voter apathy is real. Not everyone engages with workplace elections the same way they do with political ones.

But that argument has a limit, and Florida found it.

When a union is handed the exclusive legal right to negotiate every single employee’s wages, benefits and working conditions — when it can be the only voice in the room during a grievance proceeding — “they didn’t bother to vote against us” is not a sufficient basis for that privilege.

Three votes out of 202 isn’t apathy — it’s a system that stopped asking workers what they want because it didn’t have to. The new law in Florida says that if you want that power, you have to earn it by showing that a majority of the people you’ll speak for actually chose you.

Oregon’s response to that is a bill that does the exact opposite, reducing accountability by preventing people from telling workers about their rights.

The Freedom Foundation has operated in Oregon for years, mailing public employees straightforward information about their First Amendment right — affirmed in 2018 by the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Janus v. AFSCME — to opt out of union membership and dues.

More than 30,000 Oregon workers have exercised that right after being contacted by us. This has cost the state’s public-sector unions more than $100 million in annual dues. They aren’t happy about it.

Oregon’s response was to pass a new law demanded by union lobbyists that allows government unions to sue organizations that contact public employees about their rights to opt out of unions.

The stated justification is that such contact constitutes “impersonating” a union representative. The definition of this is deliberately written so loosely that it could cover almost any communication about union membership.

The penalty is $6,250 per piece of mail. Oregon has roughly 160,000 public employees on the receiving end of our outreach.

Supporters of this law, which has already been signed by Gov. Tina Kotek (D), pretend that it is simply an anti-fr