- [Narrator] This is a production of WEDU PBS, Tampa, St. Petersburg, Sarasota.

- Next on WEDU, Monday is the Labor Day Holiday, day in during which we celebrate working people.

This election year, both political parties claim they represent working people best.

We'll talk with members of Florida's labor movement, about the election, immigration, the cost of living, and much more on a special edition of Florida this week.

(bright music) Welcome back, we're approaching the Labor Day weekend, a time to reflect on how organized labor is doing in the US and in Florida.

It's a movement that has a rich history.

130 years ago, Grover Cleveland, a conservative democratic president, signed the law officially recognizing September 1st as Labor Day, a federal holiday.

This came at a time when workers were increasingly demanding better pay and working conditions at the nation's factory's, farms and mines.

Since the days of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the labor vote has gone mostly to Democrats, but recently, more and more politicians from both parties say they are fighting on behalf of working people.

Working people come from all ethnic groups and sexual orientations, and this year, they make up 63% of registered voters.

Here's vice presidential candidate JD Vance reaching out to workers at last month's GOP convention.

- I grew up in Middletown, Ohio, a small town where people spoke their minds, built with their hands and loved their God, their family, their community, and their country with their whole hearts.

But it was also a place that had been cast aside and forgotten by America's ruling class in Washington.

When I was in the fourth grade, a career politician by the name of Joe Biden supported NAFTA, a bad trade deal that sent countless good jobs to Mexico.

When I was a sophomore in high school, that same career politician named Joe Biden gave China a sweetheart trade deal that destroyed even more good American middle class manufacturing jobs.

- [Rob] And last week in Los Angeles, democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz attacked the Trump fans tickets record on labor.

- The only thing those two guys knows about working people is how to work to take advantage of them.

That's what they know about it.

Every single chance they've gotten, they've waged war on workers and their ability to collectively bargain to take that away from them.

Alls we're asking for is better wages, better benefits, better lives and dignity in the work that we do.

- Joining on the panel this week, Jim Junecko is a union representative for the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 487 in Tampa.

Valerie Chuchman is the Secretary Treasurer of the Hillsborough Classroom Teachers Association.

Kelly Benjamin is a higher education labor organizer.

Lee Bryant is the president of the Pinellas Classroom Teachers Association, and Rich Templin is the Director of Politics and Public Policy for the Florida AFL-CIO.

Nice to see all of you.

Thank you for joining the program.

Well, let's start with Jim Junecko.

Jim, when we hear JD Vance, or when we hear former President Trump say that they are on the side of working people, what are your thoughts about that?

- Sure, it sounds good, and they want people to believe that.

But the truth is, when you look at what the Trump administration did for American workers, not only did he promise to veto the Pro Act should it ever pass, but the Trump administration pushed for the corporate tax cut bill that gave companies a 50% tax break for shipping jobs overseas.

JD Vance mentioned China.

It was the Trump administration that awarded $113 billion in federal contracts to companies, to offshore jobs to China.

So it's very hypocritical when they say that they stand for American workers.

Trump packed the National Labor Relations Board with anti-worker, anti-Union appointees that have decided time and time again in favor of companies versus workers.

- It was the pursuit of cheap labor from the multinational international corporations in the United States, always trying to find the cheapest labor they could.

So when they went to China and China started growing their middle class, they started looking for other places, moving to Vietnam, wherever they needed to, to try to find the cheapest labor.

- Richard, I wanna ask you, when did the hollowing out of US manufacturing begin?

Was it NAFTA or did it begin before that when jobs were shipped over to China, Southeast Asia, places like Mexico and the Caribbean?

- I mean, we saw this phenomenon going back to the creation of the World Trade Organization to begin with.

One of the first things I was involved with that brought me to my current profession is traveling the world and protesting and participating in the anti-capital, anti-globalization movement.

I was there in Seattle when we actually shut down the first WTO meeting and things have just escalated from there.

And it's been a bipartisan problem.

What JD Vance doesn't point out is that NAFTA and these other trade deals have had incredible Republican support.

And when Democrats have tried to make changes to help American workers, they've shot it down at every time.

So this is a bipartisan problem.

It's a money problem, it's a capital problem, but it's not anything that can be attributed to a single trade agreement or a single political party or a single politician.

- So Kelly, the Republicans sometimes these days say they're against the globalists.

They don't want this globalism that's going on.

- Well, there's a funny thing happening with the shift in rhetoric, but let's not forget that state after state, legislature after legislature, anti-worker bills are being pushed by the GOP.

JD Vance, Trump, these are union busters that are out here doing everything they can to stifle the voices of American workers and make sure they don't have rights on the jobs, make sure they don't have benefits, and they're doing everything they can to stagnate.

I know people across the state that are suffering right now due to the de-certification and public sector unions across the state.

And it's causing massive chaos with families all across the state.

So they're gaslighting the American people.

They're purposefully deceiving them to score political points, and it's a travesty.

- Is it harder these days to form and keep a union in the state of Florida based on the laws that have been passed by Tallahassee and signed by the governor?

- Absolutely, I mean, if the Florida Republican Party is trying to court labor unions, they really have a weird way of doing it.

I mean, Senate Bill 256 that was passed two years ago is making it very difficult for unions to operate.

A party that wants to talk about small government, less bureaucracy, what they're doing is putting all of these hoops for labor unions to jump through, serving as a distraction to keep us from the work that we really wanna do.

- Rich, not all labor unions are being treated the same though.

It's easier now to de-certify a public union.

I think eight adjunct professors unions have been de-certified in the state of Florida already.

But those same laws that make it easier to de-certify a union don't apply to all unions.

Tell us what the distinction is in Florida.

- Well, Senate Bill 256 specifically carves out labor organizations that represent law enforcement, firefighters, and correctional officers.

Now this has created a problem because there are unions that, for example, the PBA, the Police Benevolence Association, they also represent workers who are clerks, who do receptionist work, who work in city and county governments.

And so the legislature said, well, if you're a law enforcement officer, this doesn't apply to you.

And so these police unions and fire unions were actually seeing some of their bargaining units de-certified because they weren't actually law enforcements.

So so the legislature came back and tried to tweak that, but it was a bare faced political maneuvering on the GOP by carving out those unions that represent individuals who are more inclined to support them politically.

Period, the end.

It's also interesting that the public sector unions that are being certified more proportionately represent women and the ones that have been carved out represent men.

- Lee, I want to ask you about whether or not police unions enjoy the same support as let's say a teacher's union or a construction union.

Is the membership the same across unions?

- In many cases, the police union membership is actually much lower than it was, in our case, Pinellas County Teacher Association, we were a 54% membership, which was pretty good, much higher than a lot of the police unions that were out there.

But people assume that the police unions have a high membership and it causes an issue for us.

- What's the threshold for de-certification?

What's the union drops below a certain percentage of members, then it gets de-certified, right?

- Well, they looked around and they found out that most people were not at 60%, so they set the number at 60% and that made it an easy number for them to look at.

But there was no rationale for 60%, there's no difference than why 55, why not 65?

They pick 60, totally arbitrary and then we have to try to meet that goal, which never existed before.

- Rich.

- Yeah, and it's important to note that membership is defined as the payment of dues, which by the way, I believe is a complete of violation of Article one, section six of Florida Constitution, but membership is defined as the payment of dues.

So if you have a union that has 50% of the folks in the bargaining unit paying dues to the union, when you see a contract ratified and understand that everybody gets to vote on the contract, not just the union members, you see contract ratification votes routinely over 90%.

So they're saying that the only way you can show support for your union is to pay dues.

They then eliminated automatic paycheck deduction, of which there are over 400 other automatic paycheck deductions authorized in the state of Florida in the public sector.

So they make it impossible for the union members to pay their dues.

And then they tie membership to the payment of those dues, and then they set it at an arbitrary high figure of 60%.

The entire thing was without purpose other than to eliminate rights for people, number one, and to get rid of what they saw as a homogenous political force of Democrats being organized labor, which we are not.

Over a third of our membership here at the Florida, AFL-CIO, which is all of the folks around your table are affiliates, over a third are Republicans.

- Jim, why should we care, though?

If we see it harder to form a union and keep a union, why should we care, why should the general public care?

- The bottom line is workers are good for the economy.

Workers are good for everybody whether or not you belong to a union.

The union set the stage, set the standard.

Union set the standard for wages, benefits, non-union companies have to pay their workers better to attract quality workers to compete with the workers that the union members have and this is just an attack on the working class in general.

When you strip power away from the people, you give more power to corporations.

And that's what we're seeing in Florida with Senate Bill 256, with the passage of House Bill 705, which is creating the repealing now causing apprenticeship ordinances, responsible wage ordinances to be stripped around the state.

I mean, in Miami-Dade County, we were working on passing a heat protection ordinance that was not prohibitive to business at all.

It's very hot out there for workers in construction and agriculture and the bill was set to give workers a 10 minute break every four hours.

You're talking about 20 minutes on an eight hour day, but the Chamber of commerce, the Associated Builders and Contractors, this was set to pass in Miami-Dade County.

And what they did was they went directly to the legislature in Tallahassee, preempted local government from being able to pass this protective ordinance and struck down any municipality around the state from being able to to do so.

- Did part of that law require that water be available to workers?

- Yeah, that doesn't sound like too bad of an idea.

- [Rob] And now that's not part of the law.

- No local government now can enact a heat protection ordinance for its citizens.

- I think a really good... Go ahead, Rich.

- Question though more specifically about why should the general public care.

Two things, number one, Economic Policy Institute just completed another study that found a direct connection, a direct relationship between union density in a state and the policies in that state.

States with higher union density have higher pay.

States with higher union density have more access to healthcare.

States with higher union density have safer workplaces.

And that's not just for the union members, it's everyone in that state.

The presence of unions changes public policy to benefit everyone.

That's the first reason people should care.

The second reason people should care, and this is for all the parents out there, when you drop your child off at school, you wanna make sure that that child's teachers or teachers are the best that we can get.

That they are high quality, well-trained, and understand how to teach our kids.

Now, when you de-certify these unions for our teachers, those teachers now, their pay is threatened, their benefits are threatened, and guess what?

They go to other sectors, they stop teaching and they take other jobs and that's why people should care.

- Kelly, I wanna ask you about this.

A good argument, I think, on the Republican side is that they claim we have open borders.

Now, that's debatable, but they say that if we're letting people in on those borders, more people come into the country and that they drive down wages for other workers that are already here.

So therefore, if we tighten up the borders, maybe deport a lot of people, we'll see a shortage of labor in the US and wages will go up.

- It's a straw man argument.

They're playing on fear, xenophobia, racism.

And the fact is that when there are less immigrants being allowed into to work, those jobs aren't filled by people in this country so people are struggling to find the labor to fill those jobs.

- Richard, we have a shortage of labor in Florida right now?

I mean, you told me before we started that Florida's borders are already shut down.

What do you mean by that and we have a shortage of labor?

- Well, the legislature has passed so many policies to dissuade immigrants from locating and working in Florida.

And they're proud of it, they bragged about it, but now the business community is not able to find the bodies that they need to get the job done.

And we're seeing that across the board.

If you recall, just about a year and a half ago, they were talking about the labor shortage.

And the business community convinced Ron DeSantis to cancel all of the extended unemployment payments that were being made through legislation passed at the federal level in response to COVID.

People that could not find jobs after the lockdowns, after the pandemic were able to get benefits for an extended period of time.

The governor canceled those benefits because they argued that people were not going to work, they were paid to sit home, which is preposterous.

But just this past session, we saw two separate pieces of legislation designed to weaken or eliminate regulations on child labor, child labor.

We had one bill that would allow 16 and 17 year olds to work on construction sites, especially on roofs.

And we had another bill that would've really eliminated all of Florida's enhanced child labor protections that have been on the books for decades.

This was all into a response to fill the labor needs and the hole that was made by the governor's hateful immigration policies.

- Let's talk about the cost of living for a second.

I think no doubt people are feeling a pinch, inflation's risen in the last few years, Valerie.

Do you feel better off today, three and a half years into the Biden-Harris administration, when it comes to your finances, do you feel better off and if you don't, why not?

If you do, why and who do you give credit to or blame to?

- Well, I mean, the dollar definitely doesn't go as far as it used to and I think that happens throughout time.

As educators, our wages are determined by the state and recently it's been shown that Florida teachers are paid 50th out of 51 in the nation.

So that has to come down to the state funding or their lack of funding for public education.

We have a great economy here in Florida.

Why aren't they investing in our students, why aren't they investing in our schools?

- Jim, do you feel better off?

- The budget surpluses have been astronomical in Florida.

The governor brags about how strong the economy is here and how much budget money they're returning to corporations.

But we're 50th in pay, and that's hard to retain teachers.

It's hard to recruit teachers with that pay.

It doesn't show any respect to the educators that are out there that have been working really hard.

Florida is an amazing... Newsweek said that we were the number one education system in America, and Wallet Hub said we were number 16 K through 12 in America, but we're 50th in pay and it's hard to recruit and retain quality educators when you're not rewarding them.

- What one number that jumps out at me is every year at the start of the school year, I see this number in the thousands of empty teacher positions around the state.

Do we have a problem this year?

Are there empty positions where you are at Pinellas County and why do you think there are empty positions?

- Pinellas County is actually doing fairly well with recruiting.

Part of it is we're in a district.

Our administration in Pinellas County is really working hard and doing well, but the pay is still sad and it's difficult to recruit with that.

Pinella County's been better off, but there are tens of thousands of opening in Florida.

- And Valerie, what about Hillsborough?

- Well, Hillsborough started the year with 500 teacher vacancies alone.

I mean, that's not even counting our bus drivers, our support paras.

And the problem is, honestly, when you come down to it is Hillsborough County doesn't have a millage.

Our surrounding counties do have a millage, and they're able to offer our teachers and our support staff more money.

- [Rob] Or teachers going from Hillsborough to nearby counties.

- Oh, absolutely, I know at least three or four people that have gone to Pasco since Pasco passed their millage.

I know a couple friends that have gone to Pinellas, Pinellas has a millage.

People who live... Manatee County has been sending flyers to our teachers who live in South Hillsborough County because Manatee pays more because of their millage referendum.

- Rich, do your members around the state, you're up there in Tallahassee, do your members feel that things are better after three and a half years of Biden and Harris?

- It's difficult to say how people feel.

I'm a data person and the data is that the economy has had an incredible turnaround.

As a matter of fact, we've had the best turnaround and we're the strongest economy on the planet after the COVID pandemic.

So things are turning around, but there are so many things that are state specific that are hurting people.

I just read a story in NBC News, the national division, and that was based on census data.

700,000 plus people moved to Florida during the pandemic.

They didn't have to get a vaccine, they didn't have to wear a mask, all that kind of stuff.

500,000 of those have left the state.

And when asked why they left the state, they say two things primarily.

Cost of living, especially homeowners insurance and nasty politics.

They don't wanna see trans kids beat up all the time in our capital building.

And so the legislature has done so many things, catering to big business.

That is partly what's driving up the cost.

Rent is out of control, why?

Because the legislature is doing every single thing that multinational real estate corporations are asking of them.

Insurance, bad, going to get worse.

And if there's a storm, people are gonna find out how bad because they have no more rights to sue their insurer anymore.

And so the legislature is creating this toxic soup, making it impossible for people to live here.

- Jim, what about your membership?

- Sure, I'm glad you asked because my union, the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 487, we just settled a record contract.

So the cost of living, rent is outta control for everybody in Florida.

And the only answer to that, the only solution to that for the working class is to organize a union.

We just secured 14.3% total package increases over three years.

If our members put all of those increases toward their paycheck, it's gonna be a 20% pay increase over three years and we did that by standing strong, negotiating.

We know that we're the best in what we do, and we stuck together as a union and we settled a really, really strong contract.

- Has the infrastructure bill that was passed in Washington had any impact here in Hillsborough County or Florida?

- Yes, we're seeing an incredible amount of opportunity for our workers over the next handful of years.

And by the way, former President Trump promised to pass an infrastructure bill and did not do it.

It was Joe Biden by executive order that passed the infrastructure law and we're seeing project labor agreements roll in.

That infrastructure law requires that contractors enter into a project labor agreement with a labor union and we're seeing billions of dollars and years worth of work on the horizon for our members.

- Rich, up there in Tallahassee, what are you hearing about the infrastructure bill's impact on the state of Florida?

- I get notified on a regular basis about where these grants are going and how much is being spent and the estimated job creation.

It's of a really, really high magnitude.

Florida has done really, really well in securing these dollars.

I give a lot of credit to members of our congressional delegation that have really been working hard, even the Republican congressional members who voted against it.

I mean even those that voted against it, we've talked about how Biden created inflation by flooding the economy with money, and yet our political leaders are taking it and taking credit for it.

- I'll give you a human example of the cost of fighting labor unions in the state, de-certified public sector unions.

I have a friend who's a school teacher in Clay County right next to Duval, pregnant currently, when the de-certification hit, she lost all her benefits, all of...

They just said, well, we don't have to enforce this contract anymore.

Some places are, others are not and that was an example.

They're scrambling now to figure out what to do, looking at leaving the state.

This situation is playing out thousands of times over with families across the state who are now scrambling because they don't have the protections, they don't have the benefits, they don't have the same guarantee of working conditions and they certainly don't have the wages.

So we are in a state of crisis in Florida as a result of this leadership.

- And just a general question for all five of you, we only have 15 seconds left, how fired up is your membership about this coming election?

Rich and Lee, how about your membership?

- Our active members are very fired up and we're working to get the younger people fired up.

Some of our older people are burning out.

- [Rob] Rich?

- Certainly the change in the top of the ticket has helped, but this legislature has gone so far and done so much that that really is gonna be our focus for the next 74 days is changing the Florida legislature, making incremental changes so that we can start undoing the damage that's been done over the last two, three years that Florida has basically become a sacrificial lamb to somebody's presidential aspirations.

- Well, we're out of time.

Thank you all for a great program.

If you have comments about this program, please send them to ftw@wedu.org.

And from all of us here at WEDU, have a happy Labor Day.