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

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........

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