UF’s Graduate Assistants United is uncertain if it has a future due to a bill regarding public sector union recertification moving through the Florida Legislature.
The bill, which passed the Senate March 6 and the House on Wednesday, requires at least 50% of eligible members of a bargaining unit to participate in a vote. The majority of those voting must approve it for a union to be recertified. Currently, unions only need a majority of those who voted to be recertified, even if fewer than 50% of eligible members participated in the vote.
The bill is now on its way to the governor's desk.
Austin Britton, a 28-year-old UF geography doctoral candidate and a co-president of GAU, said communicating with more than 4,000 GAU members is challenging, so getting enough people to vote is unlikely.
“Having to get over half our membership to vote would be a really Herculean task,” he said. “And we’d have to do it every year.”
If the bill passes, Britton said, it would likely only take one to two years for GAU to lose certification.
Nicholas Filannino, a 27-year-old UF plant biodiversity and conservation doctoral student and co-chair of GAU’s organizing team, said every GAU member who does not vote will be counted as a vote against recertifying the union under the bill. In the past three years, people who did not vote were not counted at all, he said.
Filannino said only about 10% of the union’s members have voted in the recertification election over the last three years, and GAU has received about a 98% approval rating among those participating.
Voting is done by mail, he said. Because many students’ leases start and end Aug. 1, their ballots are often mailed to the wrong addresses when the voting registry hasn’t been updated since before they moved.
GAU also isn’t allowed to provide stamps or help its members mail their ballots.
“It’s death by a million tiny little paper cuts,” Filannino said. “Like a million little inconveniences that just add up to a big headache.”
In August 2024, over 63,000 public labor unions had been decertified since the implementation of a 2023 Florida Senate bill targeting Florida labor unions, according to WLRN. The bill banned unions from taking dues directly out of employee paychecks and required unions to have at least 60% of their members pay dues.
Deep Adhikari, a 21-year-old UF computer science graduate student, spoke at the Senate Fiscal Policy Committee in Tallahassee March 2. Though not a GAU member, Adhikari said he took an interest in the bill because of his GAU connections through his position on UF’s Student Senate.
Adhikari said he believes the bill is a “kill order to labor unions” across Florida, and if a union can’t be certified, it will be harder for workers to bargain for better wages and benefits.
The union’s uncertain future has led its members to worry about the benefits included in its bargaining agreement. GAU, founded in 1972, has won rights and benefits including tuition waivers, free health insurance and paid sick leave over the past five decades.
Andres Gutierrez, a 22-year-old UF linguistics doctoral student, said GAU’s current bargaining agreement with UF gives graduate assistants “pretty decent” health care relative to what others receive in Florida and the rest of the U.S.
As a member of the union, Gutierrez said he’s now concerned about losing GAU’s bargaining agreement, which is tied to his health care and salary.
Without it, he said, graduate assistants may be paid lower salaries and lose health care benefits.
“A lot of these things [bargaining agreements] are meant to protect us as employees and also as students,” Gutierrez said.
Contact Cameron Countryman at ccountryman@alligator.org. Follow her on X @cpcountryman.
Cameron Countryman is a second-year journalism major and The Alligator's Spring 2026 Graduate School reporter. In her free time, she enjoys reading, paddle boarding and researching her next travel destination.
