By Paul Ortiz, Labor Notes
Florida is not Wisconsin. Wisconsin's history is Robert LaFollette,
the Progressive Party, and the birth of public employee unionism.
Conversely, Florida had the Rosewood Massacre and the Ku Klux Klan. A
grand jury recently found that "corruption is pervasive at all levels
of government."

Republican Governor Rick Scott recently signed measures making it
harder to vote, moving Florida back toward its Jim Crow past. We are one
of several states with no department to enforce wage and hour
standards.

Despite these obstacles, faculty members in Florida's public
institutions of higher learning have been building unions in our
right-to-work state at an outstanding rate in recent months. At the
University of Florida union density was about 20 percent last year. Now
it's over 40 percent and rapidly rising.

One key impetus was the state legislature's attack on public employee
unionism. The Automatic Decertification Bill would have decertified any
public employee union with less than half those it represented signed
up as members. The cynically named Paycheck Protection Bill would have
prohibited unions from deducting dues from paychecks.

While these bills did not pass, they convinced would-be members that
public employees are under siege. Equally important to our success was
United Faculty of Florida's recent track record of defending the jobs of
laid-off employees, both tenured and untenured.

Colleges across the country have made it clear that tenure no longer
means a guarantee of job security. We stressed to faculty that the only
real guarantee of due process, security of employment, and salary
increases is a union contract.

Professors at Florida State University in Tallahassee are organizing
just as fast as at University of Florida, as are instructors at our
other major research universities. Faculty at Florida's unionized
community colleges had already built membership rates of 70 percent and
higher.

(In this instance Wisconsin, not coincidentally, was like Florida:
six groups of university workers there have voted for a union since
Governor Scott Walker introduced his plan to eliminate public employee
bargaining.)Each member an organizer
In normal times, college instructors tend to work in isolation. We
teach our courses, hold office hours, and conduct research mostly as
individuals. Our organizing campaign has brought us closer together as
colleagues and brother and sister workers. Our campaign adopted the idea
that with a bit of peer education, every member can be an organizer.

With the assistance of NEA organizers we gave members the confidence
to conduct office visits, interpret the contract, and speak at
departmental meetings about the importance of unionism.

Our best teacher was experience. We met informally several times per
week to discuss what recruitment pitches worked and which did not. Our
lead organizers coordinated an online volunteer sign-up sheet that
ensured member-organizers spread out across the entire bargaining unit.

We discovered that one-on-one conversations with potential members
worked best. However, we also garnered new members by speaking to
faculty at the end of department meetings. We discovered that we needed
to modify our informational and recruitment flyers to reflect the
divergent experiences of tenure-track and non-tenured instructors and
staff.

We held informal social "mixers" where members could update each
other on the status of the campaign and just relax and have a good time.Tying in politics
Because the state legislature was pushing anti-worker legislation, it
was not difficult to weave in the crucial ties between the workplace
and politics in our recruitment pitches.

As the rank-and-file coordinator of our organizing drive noted, "We
would knock on faculty office doors and start off, 'You know what Scott
Walker's doing in Wisconsin? Well, it's coming to Florida, too.' So I
guess you could say it was Walker and Scott and the Koch brothers who
helped us."

Faculty started to see their union in a different way. It wasn't just
about bargaining on campus. It was about the bigger picture of state
and national politics, budget cuts to education, and ongoing attacks on
public sector workers -- us!

For years our union has sponsored rallies and educational events
focused on how our students' needs take a back seat to the relentless
defunding of education. Stepping up participation in our central labor
council also helped us connect our struggles with those in other sectors
of the economy.

Our coordinator observed, "Some new members joined out of solidarity
with other public employees. Some started to understand that unions give
them a voice in government for all kinds of issues they care about -- not
just pay and benefits, but the future of education and our state as a
whole."Involving new members
Our members devoted themselves to urging representatives in
Tallahassee to vote for public education and against the anti-union
bills.

This is also how we encouraged our newest members to get involved
immediately in union activities. Many newer members found it easier to
call a state senator than to make an office visit. We emphasized that
both activities were critical to our union's survival.

While professors are vilified as snobby elitists on cable news, we
discovered that many faculty share a profound sense of alienation about
their labor.

Our organizing campaign has given faculty the space to think about
how valuable our labor power is to the world. One new member in the
humanities said, "I joined UFF because we produce the most important
products in our society: original ideas, new ways of thinking and
perhaps most importantly, criticisms of our past and present reality
that may be unpopular but necessary."

Most faculty members still don't see themselves as labor activists.
But building a successful union movement allowed them increasingly to
think of the relationship between their work and the crises in the
larger society that affect higher education and democracy.* * *
Paul Ortiz of the United Faculty of Florida, NEA/AFT, is associate
professor of history and director of the Samuel Proctor Oral History
Program at the University of Florida. UFF/NEA/AFT photo of pro-union rally at the University of Florida via Labor Notes.