Commentary: Teacher Union Power Is Still in Full Bloom

CTA Event

As a result of the Janus decision in 2018, no teacher or any public employee has to pay a penny to a union as a condition of employment. The good news is that since then, 20% of workers in non-right-to-work states have dropped out of their unions, according to a report from the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. The not-so-good news is that 70% of teachers nationwide are still willingly paying union dues, a great deal of which goes to politics, specifically to progressive candidates and causes.

The California Teachers Association has the honor of being the biggest political-spending teachers’ union in the country. A recent report reveals that between 1999 and 2020, the 300,000+ member union spent an astonishing $222,940,629 on politics – about $6 million was spent on the federal level, while almost $217 million stayed in the state – with 98.2% of all spending going to Democrats. The top advocacy issues for CTA include regulating charter schools, immigration reform, social justice, and a slew of almost exclusively left-wing causes.

Read More

Mankato Mayo Clinic Workers Vote to Boot Union Officials

The majority of a unit of nursing support, clerical and environmental staff have voted to remove a union’s officials from power at Mankato Mayo Clinic.

Members of the unit signed the petition May 9 to oust American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees Local 1856 union officials, according to a National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation news release. Mankato Mayo employee Melody Morris, with free legal aid from the foundation, filed the petition asking the National Labor Relations Board to hold a union decertification vote at the hospital. The majority of her coworkers supported the petition, the release said.

Read More

Major Government Unions Lose over 200K Members

The top four public labor unions in the U.S. lost hundreds of thousands of members since a 2018 Supreme Court case that ruled government employees could not be forced to pay a union to keep their job, a new report shows that.

The Commonwealth Foundation released the report, which found that the top four public labor unions – AFT, AFSCME, NEA, and SEIU – lost nearly 219,000 members altogether since the Janus v. AFSCME ruling.

Read More

University of Minnesota Labor Union Demands University of Minnesota Police Be Disarmed

The University of Minnesota’s UMN AFSCME, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, demanded that the University of Minnesota disarm their police force and create a Civilian Police Accountability Council.

The negotiations started this month between the University of Minnesota’s management team and four unions represented by AFSCME.

Read More

DFL Legislators Say ‘Core Function’ of Government Is to Protect Citizens from Criminals in Push to End Private Prisons

Minnesota House and Senate Democrats unveiled a set of companion bills to ban private prisons in the state at a press conference Tuesday. The legislation comes in response to talks of reopening Prairie Correctional Facility in Appleton, Minnesota, which is owned by CoreCivic and has been closed since 2010. House…

Read More

Public Sector Unions Make Up Half of All Union Membership

Washington DC

by Richard McCarty   Public sector unions have long exploited taxpayers by pushing for higher taxes, higher spending, and generous benefits and extravagant pensions for government workers while opposing measures to hold bureaucrats accountable. Fortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court’s Janus decision, which gave government workers a choice of whether to belong…

Read More