State seeks to scuttle union lawsuit

State Government

The state has asked a federal judge to toss out a lawsuit in which a union representing Duval County government workers is challenging the constitutionality of a new law that places additional restrictions on public-employee unions.

Attorneys for Don Rubottom, chairman of the Florida Public Employees Relations Commission, filed a 40-page document Friday asking U.S. District Judge Timothy Corrigan to dismiss the case and reject a request for a preliminary injunction.

Rubottom, whose agency is responsible for carrying out the law, is the named defendant for the state.

Laborers International Union of North America, Local 630, and three individual plaintiffs filed the lawsuit last month challenging the law, which includes changes such as preventing union dues from being deducted from workers’ paychecks and requiring union members to fill out government-worded membership forms.

Among other things, the lawsuit contends that the membership-form requirement violates First Amendment rights. But the state’s lawyers Friday disputed the arguments and pointed to issues such as “transparency” as justification for the law, which Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Republican-controlled Legislature approved this spring.

“Its purpose is to ensure that public employees are aware of their rights to join (or not join) their unions and their rights to pay (or not pay) dues to those unions,” the state’s attorneys wrote. “It also ensures that public employees have some understanding of how their unions use those dues. Public employees are often not aware of these issues. Indeed, because unions often use the government’s payroll to draw their dues automatically from public employees’ paychecks, many employees are not even aware of how much they pay in dues every year.”

The lawsuit, which also names as defendants the city of Jacksonville, the municipal utility JEA and the Duval County School Board, is one of at least three constitutional challenges filed against the law.