Last month, a union representing Florida’s prison nurses filed a lawsuit to block the privatization of inmate health care services in the Department of Corrections. Now, as Sascha Cordner reports, two labor unions have jumped on the bandwagon, and filed a similar lawsuit of their own.
The lawsuit was filed by the Federation of Physicians and Dentists, and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees. The Federation’s AFSCME Legislative Director Doug Martin says his group represents about 13-hundred non-professional health care employees and support staff, who will lose their jobs as a result of the privatization of inmate health care services:
“This lawsuit was filed to protect the jobs and careers and legal interests of our members who work in the Department of Corrections because a very similar privatization in South Florida also contained in the budget was found to have been done illegally.”
A judge ruled last year that a plan to privatize the South Florida correctional facilities is unconstitutional because it was put in the budget and not passed as a separate law. That decision is currently under appeal.
