Two years of negotiations between the AFT-affiliated Florida Education Association/United and its state NEA counterpart have yielded the Florida Education Association--a new merged organization that is Florida's largest employee union.

The merged union, which has more than 120,000 members, will speak with a powerful and unified voice on behalf of more than 250,000 public education employees and faculty and 2.4 million public school children in the state. Under the agreement, FEA will phase in full AFL-CIO affiliation and provide full representation rights to all members. Florida joins Minnesota and Montana as the third state in the past few years to complete an AFT-NEA merger.

Both the AFT and the NEA "have always believed that Florida deserves the very highest quality public schools," said new FEA president Maureen Dinnen, a history and government professor at Broward Community College and former president of the NEA's state organization. "We have stood together as Florida's strongest advocates in the fight to increase salaries, improve working conditions and advance the education profession, and we have now joined together as one, under our new banner...to pursue our most important mission--to support and improve public education, the foundation of our free democracy."

Honored guests who attended the founding convention included Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), AFT president Sandra Feldman and NEA president Bob Chase. "This merger will build an even stronger and more sophisticated organization than its two predecessors," Feldman told FEA delegates.

Dinnen, who was elected in 1998, was the first higher education leader to run the state NEA organization. Dinnen says she could not have fought harder for the merger: "Between October 1999 and May of this year, I went to 52 meetings to explain what the merger would mean."

The merger brings 3,000 new higher education faculty and staff into the unified organization--adding six community colleges to AFT's two--Miami-Dade Community College and Edison. Also affiliated is the United Faculty of Florida, a statewide unit at the State University of Florida system. The UFF is facing a major change because the state Legislature voted to break apart the board of regents system by 2003. Each of the universities will then have its own board, and the faculty union on each campus will negotiate its own contract. Dinnen and others foresee potential disaster for the universities as the weaker campuses have to vie with the stronger ones for state funds. A strong union and faculty voice will be essential, she says.

Solidarity pays off for higher education units

Divide and conquer. It's a timeless strategy, whether in war or in collective bargaining. Generals know its value, and so do school administrators, K-12 and higher education alike. In education, when there are different unions or multiple chapters within a union representing employees on campus, savvy management negotiators often play the groups against each other.

And it works--sometimes. At Southwestern Illinois College (formerly Belleville Area College)--which has four separate AFT-affiliated bargaining units--administrators traditionally negotiated first with faculty, then gave the support staff and public safety workers what was left. Not surprisingly, the support staff often got shortchanged. "My group often felt that the faculty didn't care about us," says Marcia Boone, president of the support staff unit of the Belleville Area College Employees Union.

Last year, with three of the four contracts due to expire around the same time (all except the part-time staff), the college board of trustees spread the word early that its aim was to limit raises for all groups to 3 percent per year. "We knew we were in for difficult negotiations," says faculty local president Leo Welch.

Realizing that their lack of solidarity would weaken every unit, Welch and Boone called a joint meeting of their members to discuss negotiations. That led to well-attended weekly meetings with updates from the leaders, and even more important, a new sense of unity among the faculty and support staff. Among the actions was an unprecedented joint strike vote. Soon after, large numbers of staff started wearing buttons, one of which read: "I don't want to strike but I will."

To support the workers, students organized their own protest, held in front of the college president's office, which generated lots of local press coverage. "I think the president was totally shocked by this show of student support," Welch notes. "Essentially, the board saw that its position was leading to a strike, and that they would have all three units out at the same time."

A more productive joint negotiating session followed, and the different units soon had tentative agreements in hand. As for the promised 3 percent cap on salary increases? That was old news. The support staff won raises of 6 percent the first year and 4 percent in each of the next two years, as well as a major concession on flexible work schedules. "We felt that the joint effort gave us strength," Boone says. "That's demonstrated by what they gave us in our contracts."

The faculty unit received similar raises and went a long way toward boosting its image among many new members. The small public-safety unit won raises of 8 percent, 4 percent and 4 percent.

Even though the next contract talks are two years away, Boone and Welch maintain regular contact about a range of issues that affect their different units. What's more, Boone adds, "I think we've changed some attitudes. We know we can count on each other in a pinch."