Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody is suing the Biden administration over its threat to withhold millions of dollars in federal transit aid because of an anti-union law that Gov. Ron DeSantis signed this year.
The Federal Transit Act authorizes the Department of Transportation to distribute money to counties and regional transit authorities to finance mass transit systems, including bus and rail systems. But there are conditions, including that these entities can’t diminish union organizing rights.
The Biden administration warned Florida soon after SB 256 became law that it was considering withholding transit funds because of the threat to union rights.
Attorney General Moody, a Republican like DeSantis who criticizes President Joe Biden, filed an 18-page complaint last week in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, alleging the federal government lacks constitutional and statutory authority to withhold the money, which she said could amount to $800 million.
The Florida law bars public sector unions from deducting dues from members’ paychecks, requiring employees to write checks instead. Unions’ membership would have to constitute 60% of a bargaining unit, an increase from the old threshold of 50%.
Its provisions don’t apply, however, to first-responder unions that tend to support Republicans politically, but they do apply to Democratic-oriented shops including the Florida Education Association.
“Florida passed laws to protect workers from being strong-armed by unions,” Moody said in a written statement.
“Biden, intent on driving our country into the ground, continues to try to force states to implement his bad policies. As long as I am Florida’s attorney general, Washington will never decide how we run our state. We’re pushing back against this overreach to protect our state’s autonomy and Florida workers.”
The lawsuit names the U.S. departments of Transportation and Labor, the Federal Transit Administration, and officials in all three of those agencies.
The law contains a carveout allowing the Public Employees Relations Commission (PERC), which handles labor agreements, to waive its requirements “to the extent necessary for the public employer to comply with the requirements of” federal labor law.
Waiver
Rich Templin, legislative and policy director or the Florida AFL-CIO, said his understanding was that the matter had been resolved and was nonplussed that Moody had gone to court.
“This is about political considerations and ideological considerations, not anything having to do with the well-functioning of state government,” he told the Phoenix by telephone.
A federal statute, 49 U.S. Code § 5333, allows the U.S. Department of Labor to enforce minimum labor standards on projects financed by the federal government, including “the continuation of collective bargaining rights.”
Over the summer, under this pressure, PERC waived enforcement of the state law through expiration of existing transit union contracts but the feds insisted the protections be maintained through the life of individual projects that the federal government is paying for, according to the brief. At issue in Moody’s lawsuit is whether the Biden administration can do that.
Moody’s office elaborated in a motion for a preliminary injunction filed on Tuesday. The state claims that any federal regulation of this sort requires unambiguous authorization through a statute passed by Congress and that that’s lacking here.
“So far, Florida’s Public Employees Relations Commission (PERC) has exercised its statutory authority to conditionally waive the relevant provisions of SB 256 and avoid a devastating loss of funding to the state. But Florida suffers irreparable sovereign injury every day that its duly enacted laws are not in effect. And if PERC instead declined to grant waivers, the harm from losing nearly $800 million in federal funding would similarly be irreparable. This court should grant a preliminary injunction,” Tuesday’s brief argues.
“For purposes of this suit, Florida does not contest that these waivers were necessary to comply with [the federal law]. What prompted this suit was the Department of Labor’s subsequent demand, a few weeks after PERC granted the time-limited waivers, that PERC waive the three provisions of SB 256 for the life of the federally funded projects,” it says.
The original brief also claims that, under the federal Administrative Procedures Act, which imposes strict procedural standards for federal agency rulemaking, the federal action is “arbitrary, capricious … or otherwise not in accordance with law,” or “in excess of statutory jurisdiction, authority, or limitations.”
“If Congress intended to prevent Florida from incrementally reforming the collecting bargaining process in Florida, it was required to use language more clear than general language regarding ‘the continuation of collective bargaining rights’,” that brief reads.
Templin noted, however, that the new state law was written to accommodate the demands of the federal law.
“The Legislature and the governor approved this process for these waivers,” he said. “It is state law that sets these workers aside from certain elements of the legislation. That was their decision. The law in question [the Federal Transit Act] is over 60 years over with no discernible problems that have ever been mentioned.”
This article originally appeared in florida phoenix