Membership eDues
The right to withdraw union dues from members’ paychecks is at risk. OCEA and FEA are proactively launching an eDues system to ensure members remain in good standing with minimal disruptions. Using FEA’s eDues system, your membership dues will be withdrawn directly from your bank account on payday, twice per month. The following information will explain the technology behind eDues.
What is eDues?
eDues means payment of your union dues through bank draft on the same schedule as your regular deductions from your paycheck.
How does it help your privacy?
Out-of-state political groups have been soliciting districts to give them names, addresses, etc., of employees who are union members, to add them to junk mail lists. This system would end that problem.
There have even been instances of bad-faith actors impersonating union members to run various scams on other union members through school district public records. Our system would help prevent this issue.
Removing the school district from the equation protects your personal information from being harvested or stolen and harder for the admin to know who our members are.
How does eDues work?
Locals across the state are partnering with the Florida Education Association (FEA) to offer eDues to members through Plaid, a third-party technology platform that facilitates communication between your bank account and your union’s bank account to complete an ACH payment – The Automated Clearing House Network.
Many other apps, services, and merchants rely on Plaid to connect with their customers’ bank accounts (like VENMO). Plaid connects its clients with over 11,000 different financial institutions.
If you regularly use a credit/debit card online or in stores or input your bank username/password or account numbers anywhere online to make purchases or pay bills, Plaid is almost certainly involved in at least some of your transactions.
What happens when I sign up for eDues?
When you sign up for eDues, you will be asked to enter the login credentials or bank account information for your financial institution at an online portal.
You will then be asked to authorize your bank account to make dues payments on exactly the same payment schedule as you are currently paying dues via payroll deduction.
Plaid will tell your bank to send those payments to your local union’s bank.
Your local union and FEA are not directly involved in the transaction, nor do we want to be! At no point in this process is any of your banking information in the hands of any local union or FEA representative, employee, officer, etc.
Your local union only sees the payments themselves and who is making them, not any other protected or confidential information.
Do I need to worry about double-paying my dues?
OCEA will be able to see your eDues signup within minutes. OCEA will also notify the district to cease your payroll dues deduction.
Just to be safe, keep an eye on your pay stub. If you notice that you have had dues both deducted from your paycheck and withdrawn from your bank account, send the documents to your union immediately for verification so a refund can be processed.
As stated above, OCEA and FEA staff do not collect or store your banking information in our databases. Therefore we cannot share or lose your account data.
ACH is the same manner in which the District deposits your paycheck to your bank account. eDues simply allows members to automate the direct payment of dues from their bank account to their local Union’s bank account through ACH – the Automated Clearing House.
ACH is trusted by financial institutions to transfer funds electronically, and it is more secure than other forms of payment collection, such as cash and paper checks, according to the Federal Reserve. This is why it is the trusted way our members make payments every day for things like car payments, mortgages, rent, cell phone bills, insurance, and more.
www.nacha.org/news/ach-payments-have-lowest-fraud-rate-fed-survey-finds
