Teachers’ unions in Florida started in the nineteenth century with their precursor organization the Florida Teachers’ Associations. They were organized privately as a state body with individual counties forming local Teachers’ Associations. Since Florida was a racially segregated “Jim Crow” state, African Americans organized a Colored Teachers’ Association. The leaders of these teachers’ organizations directed them as vehicles for professional development and not teachers’ unions as collective bargaining units which exist today. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Colored Florida State Teachers’ Association, and the state association leaders like Harry T. Moore and John Gilbert encouraged NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall to litigate for Hillsborough County to challenge unequal pay between Black and White public school teachers. This is the first case of any Florida Teachers’ Association advocating for the rights of teachers as workers.
During the early twentieth century, the Florida Chautauqua Association–founded in DeFuniak Spring in 1885–became the Florida Education Association (FEA); a White-only organization including several White Florida Teachers’ Associations. By 1966, the White Florida Education Association merged with the (Black) Florida State Teachers’ Association into one statewide racially integrated organization. In 1967, the FEA campaigned politically on the issues of student overcrowding, poor pay for public school teachers, and inadequate resources coming from the Florida Legislature to counter the growing crisis in public education.
Conditions continued to deteriorate, and by February 1968, the FEA successfully organized a statewide strike of over 27,000 public school teachers to address their concerns. The FEA negotiated with the state to end the strike, resulting in modest gains for public school teachers. A long-term outcome of the 1968 Florida Teachers’ Strike was the recognition of the right of public employees to collectively bargain included in the 1968 Florida Constitution. A 1969 Florida Supreme Court Case, Dade County Classroom Teachers’ ASS’N, INC v. Ryan upheld the right of teachers to bargain collectively in the state.
Between 1968 and 1977 Florida college and university faculty organized two statewide unions through the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), one being the United Community College Faculty (1977) of Florida and the other the United Faculty of Florida (UFF) representing university faculty (1976). In 1979, UFF received separate recognition from AFT as a single statewide local (#7463) representing college and university faculty. In 1981, the Florida Legislature exempted graduate students as employees and thus were not public sector workers. UFF filed a successful lawsuit and the Florida Court of Appeals decided that eliminating graduate students as public sector employees was unconstitutional. This opened the way for graduate students throughout Florida to be organized in Graduate Student Associations under UFF.
During its early decades, UFF concentrated on establishing itself through negotiating and enforcing collective bargaining contracts and had little capacity for building membership or political action. Hostile state politicians created crises in 2000-2003 and 2010-2011, forcing UFF to expand its internal organizing and prioritize membership growth. These existential threats had long-term effects, as UFF responded by building a stronger, more sustainable union. Membership grew significantly in all three sectors of the union, university, college and graduate assistants, and more members stepped up into leadership and organizing positions.
After 1968, labor lawyer Tobias Simon litigated two cases on behalf of public employees from the Dade County Classroom Teachers Association (DCCTA); he won both cases. Although DCCTA established the right to collectively bargain, the Florida legislature still weakened unions through legislation and labor policies. First, the state prohibits public employees from striking or boycotting in both the Constitution and in Collective Bargaining Agreements. Second, the impasse process to reach a conclusion in contract negotiations when both parties are apart allows the governing body to make a final decision with the governing body in our current structure being the college’s or university’s own Board of Trustees. Between 1976 and 2001 the UFF bargaining team negotiated statewide with the Board of Regents which was the governing body of the public university system. Governor JEB Bush and the Legislature abolished the Board of Regents and created individual Board of Trustees at each university to govern locally with a Board of Governors over the entire system. From that point bargaining moved from the state to the local chapter with each chapter responsible for bargaining the conditions of work at their respective colleges or universities.
Threats to academic freedom predate the birth of UFF. The Florida Legislature and various governing authorities of Florida’s public colleges and universities periodically violated academic freedom throughout the twentieth century. These attacks included the 1923 removal of the President of Florida A & M College President Nathan B. Young for refusing to remove the science and liberal arts from the curriculum of the Historically Black College under orders from state officials. In 1927, the state legislature and Board of Control who were in charge of the public college and university system tried to censor books about evolution, sociology, literature and anthropology at Florida’s public universities. The most notable political invasion in academic freedom was conducted by the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee (FLIC), which from 1956 to 1965 investigated civil rights activities of students at Florida State University who supported the Tallahassee Bus Boycott and later targeted LGBTQ+ students and faculty at Florida’s public colleges and universities. After the FLIC descended on the University of South Florida in 1962 the American Association of University Professors censured the FLIC based on their report that stated the FLIC targeted professors around the state over their sexual identities and political philosophies.
The first Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) in 1976 enshrined Academic Freedom as a right. That first statement on academic freedom was simple, short and stated in full:
It is the policy of the Board and UFF to maintain and encourage full academic freedom. In the exercise of this freedom, employees shall be free to discuss fully their own subjects frankly and forthrightly and to engage freely in scholarly and creative activity and publish the results. Academic freedom is accompanied by the corresponding responsibility to provide objective and skillful exposition of one’s subjects and to indicate when appropriate that one is not an institutional representative unless specifically authorized as such. (CBA, Florida Board of Regents & UFF, 1976-1978)
In 2021, the University of Florida came under national scrutiny because the university restricted three faculty scholars from testifying in a voting rights case against the state of Florida. UFF President Andrew Gothard threatened the university with legal action. Eventually from mounting media attention the University of Florida reversed its decision.
Since 1999 UFF has lived with the constant existential threat of attack by powerful political enemies in the Legislature and often the Governor’s office. UFF has responded by building a bigger and stronger union, including strengthening our outreach with state legislators, other unions and allies. We have developed more chapter-level Government Relations Committees to meet and work with our local legislators, begun to organize regional cooperation among chapters who share the same state senators and representatives, and built a larger state Government Relations operation to coordinate campaigns on specific issues. As in other areas like organizing, bargaining and contract enforcement, in political action UFF has grown from a reactive to a more proactive stance to meet escalating challenges, planning for future tests and reducing organizational vulnerabilities.