The United Faculty of Florida (UFF) is a statewide union representing close to 10,000 public higher education workers in Florida. UFF has chapters in all public universities (12 in total). We have 16 chapters in the state college system and 4 graduate student chapters. UFF represents mostly instructional faculty and instructional support faculty.
HELU asks: In the current political situation, how does the union protect the work of its members?
It varies depending on what level we are talking about. In Florida, at all of the UFF chapters, we have CBAs, Collective Bargaining Agreements, or contracts. Each chapter negotiates their own contract which includes rights and privileges. These are enforced through grievances, which is pretty routine. That’s how it works on the chapter level. The statewide level is different. On the statewide level, we offer assistance if contract enforcements get beyond the means of the local. It’s really member-driven. We can come in with legal assistance. We can also provide messaging, like messages to our members about how to deal with ICE.
I am the President at the statewide level, recently elected.
Censoring the Intro to Sociology text
Here is a situation that demonstrates how the local and the state-level work together. It’s specifically about the work of teaching. Back in September 2025 there was a UFF Senate meeting, an opportunity for Senate members to gather and talk. A few of the chapter leaders who were also sociology profs were on the Senate and they heard that there was a committee revising an open-source textbook for Intro to Sociology. Intro to Sociology is a course that is in the General Education curriculum. Open Source is a whole library of licensed textbooks that students can download for free – zero cost. This committee apparently had four profs on it, but the rest were from the Board of Governors, the state regulatory body, and these four profs were taking out parts that the BOG objected to.
SB 266 prohibits certain concepts or theories from being taught in the General Education program. For example, it prohibits any lessons about that suggests there is inherent inequality in the US whether race, gender or class based. We’ve had administrators who interpret that as you can’t teach about race and gender at all. To state officials and our administration, those concepts are prohibited from the General Education curriculum. Gen Ed is required. All students take it. The four profs in that group were working to throw those concepts out or revise and water down those concepts to please the Board of Governors so that the course, Intro to Sociology, would stay in the Gen Ed curriculum.
We refer to this as an example of anticipatory compliance. Complying ahead of time. This is not resisting.
The union people who were at the UFF Senate meeting approached me after the Senate meeting and said we want to form a working group about this. We think this is going to be a threat. I said sure. Can I sit in on your meetings? So about three of them formed this working group initially and pushed it out to other Sociology faculty – maybe 7, and built it up to about 15. They met on zoom. It was really run by Sociology professors, local leaders and union members, monitoring the situation, determining strategy. I want to make that really clear. This was bottom-up stuff, member led.
Eventually we learned that this censored text based on open-source texts had been drafted, and was being circulated along with a set of standards. When it was being circulated, we got a copy of it and shared it with our working group. Had the Soc group not been organized, publicized, populated by sociology profs around the whole system and working on this, we would have been unprepared. The censored Sociology 101 text might have been forced on the whole state college system, both our state colleges and the university system.
This kind of thing would normally go through some shared governance system like the Faculty Senate, but here it was the union that was working on it to get the message out and in some case local faculty senates followed up, asked questions, formed academic freedom committees and passed resolutions thus fulfilling their role in shared governance. Also, we were able to educate members of sociology departments across the state so when their administrations came with plans to use the censored textbooks and standards they could ask questions and push back.
There are conservative activists who believe that sociology is a course that is actually “indoctrination.” This idea comes out of conservative think tanks like the Claremont Institute and the Heritage Foundation. They think it creates liberal minded students, so one way to transform higher ed and make it more accommodating to their worldview is to keep students from learning to use some concepts in sociology. Governor DeSantis actually hired Scott Yenor, the political scientist from Boise State University and member of the Christian nationalist organization Society for American Civic Renewal, and put him up to be on the Board of Trustees at University of West Florida. We think he was behind a lot of the sociology policy in Florida since he advocated the same think in Idaho at his own institution.
We got that message out there that students were going to be learning from a censored text. It embarrassed the Board of Governors and the Department of Education. There was about 6 months where news outlets from all over were interviewing us. We were ready with answers, why it was a danger to have a censored text book, why the state shouldn’t be creating standards for an academic discipline they knew nothing about, and so on.
Eventually they took Intro to Sociology out of the General Ed curriculum and said basically if you want to teach it uncensored, go ahead, but it can’t be part of the required Gen Ed. It is no longer in General Ed as of the coming fall, so people are using whatever textbook they want to use.
The victory was getting them to withdraw the text and getting under their skin. We wanted them to keep Intro to Sociology in the General Ed requirements so our fight is not over.
The UFF community of interest and state laws that block organizing
The UFF “community of interest” which defines the bargaining unit is anyone connected to classroom. This means instructors who engage with students in contact hours, but also anybody who is connected to offering resources or consulting for the classroom.
The state does not include adjuncts or people who work part time in our bargaining unit. In the 2020s, SEIU organized 8 adjunct chapters. Then the State legislature passed SB 256 (2023) that required 60% density and SEIU could not maintain those adjunct chapters and they folded. They are not in the bargaining unit and we don’t right now have the capacity to organize outside our bargaining units. Back in 2023 the state passed SB 256 and this year SB 1296 which echoes the 2010 Wisconsin Article 10 legislation. It says that to stay certified, unions have to have 50% plus one in all certification elections. If someone doesn’t vote it’s a no vote. So this is what we’re focusing on right now. We have to boost all of our membership to 60% of the bargaining unit. When we are secure year to year, I think we will have conversations about building a wall-to-wall union which recent legislation is making difficult.
A new right-wing accreditation consortium in the works
At the state level, we monitor the regulatory landscape and try to insert ourselves. We can tell when we are successful. I went to a Labor Notes conference in Chicago and a union leader from Baltimore said to me, “If they are reacting to you, you are winning.” When they don’t ignore us, we demonstrate that we are speaking for our members. It’s a lot of work, but “many hands make less work.”
Here is another example. There is a new accreditation consortium in the works, another Project 2025 activity. It is called the Commission on Public Higher Education, the CPHE. The entire CPHE was blueprinted in Project 2025 document. It being designed to cover higher ed in states in the southeast where some have unions and some do not. The standards by which higher ed institutions would be evaluated would be politically driven. It would be a publicly funded and appointed commission, controlled by politically appointed people.
We are working to oppose this with a handful of people in these states, some of whom are union leaders and some not. It started with North and South Carolina, Georgia, the reach of this accreditation scheme is as far as Texas and Iowa. Eventually the AAUP joined and are assisting us and sharing resources. We are fighting for the autonomy of the higher ed system. An accreditation should be free to be critical of the state if the state is interfering in higher ed. A group like our sociology working group is documenting, recording and messaging, trying to raise the alarm about what might happen if this goes through. This is a multi-state concern.
UFF and HELU
What does UFF get out of being part of HELU? Before we joined, we researched it. I was just coming in to leadership. In our senate meetings, we knew it was important to be connected into a larger organizing collective movement, to get support, and support each other. The thing I got out of HELU the most is really knowing what’s going on around the country. As a chapter I would push that out to our members: it’s not just you in Orlando, this is going on in New York, This is going on in New Mexico. HELU connects us all to each other initially with information but this helps to build solidarity from workplace to workplace, city to city and state to state.