Today, the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation has published its newest "Know Your Rights" page, this one geared to charter school teachers and employees who are forced to accept union officials' "representation," even if the workers want nothing to do with the union. 

National Right to Work Foundation staff attorneys compiled a list of rights charter school teachers and employees have in the workplace with the specific goal to enlighten charter school employees that they can make decisions in an atmosphere free of threats, harassment, coercion, or misrepresentation.

The Foundation is also publishing a new brochure (pdf) for workers who want to know more about their rights working in a unionized charter school workplace. You can download the tri-fold brochure here (pdf).

Teacher Files Brief in Wisconsin Government Unionism Reform Battle in Federal Court

Public-sector union bosses file desperate lawsuit seeking to protect forced dues stranglehold over Wisconsin’s public workers and taxpayers

Madison, WI (June 29, 2011) – With free legal assistance from the National Right to Work Foundation and the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, a Kenosha teacher affected by Wisconsin’s recent public-sector unionism reforms has filed an amicus curiae brief in federal court.

Kristi Lacroix, who has been a teacher for 13 years and is an English teacher at the LakeView Technology Academy in Pleasant Prairie, filed the brief Monday in favor of the reforms which sharply limited government union officials’ monopoly bargaining power over public workers and taxpayers.

Earlier this month, the Wisconsin Supreme Court upheld Governor Scott Walker’s government-sector monopoly bargaining reform bill, which protects the Right to Work for most government employees and bans automatic forced-union-dues seizures from public employees’ paychecks.

In response, union lawyers filed a new lawsuit in federal court seeking to overturn the bill, claiming that Freedom of Association – the right of American citizens to voluntarily come together to express their opinions and petition the government – gives union bosses forced-dues and monopoly bargaining powers.

Foundation staff attorneys have won at the United States Supreme Court numerous times on this very issue, winning precedents that support the constitutionality of Wisconsin’s government-sector monopoly bargaining reform bill.

Read the entire release here.

With the help of National Right to Work Foundation staff attorneys, a Florida teacher won a settlement from the state's Public Employees Relations Commission that orders United Teachers of Dade (UTD) union officials to stop discriminating against teachers who don't belong to the union. Miami-Dade schools are also required to post the following notice to inform teachers of their rights

For more on the Foundation's efforts to help Florida teachers, see our press release from last September.

Citizen Activist Wins Battle to Inform Keystone State Teachers of Their Constitutional Rights

Teacher union bosses aimed to keep Pennsylvania’s teachers in the dark

Harrisburg, PA (September 30, 2010) – With free legal assistance from the National Right to Work Foundation, citizen activist Simon Campbell has bested teacher union bosses in state court over his right to inform Pennsylvania’s nonmember teachers of their constitutional rights regarding union membership and dues payment.

Several years ago, Simon Campbell of Bucks County founded a group dedicated to the goal of making sure all public school children in the state have the legal right to a strike-free education after his own children were forced out of school in the wake of a debilitating union boss-instigated strike.

More recently, Campbell has requested that public school districts disclose the mailing addresses of teachers who have refrained from formal union membership with the Pennsylvania State Education Association (PSEA) union, but are still forced to pay union dues or fees as a condition of employment because Pennsylvania does not have Right to Work protections for its workers.

Campbell wanted to advise the teachers about their rights under National Right to Work Foundation-won U.S. Supreme Court precedent, such as their right not to subsidize union boss activities other than collective bargaining and contract administration and their right to challenge the union hierarchy’s calculations regarding the amount of forced dues charged to nonmember teachers.

Read the full press release here.

Over the Labor Day weekend, columns by National Right to Work president Mark Mix appeared in newspapers across the country and online exposing Big Labor's power grabs and coercive practices over American workers.

In Investor's Business Daily Mix highlighted the extremism and ethics problems of Craig Becker, the Service Employee International Union's (SEIU) inside man at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB):

In the face of bipartisan opposition, Obama bypassed Congress and installed Becker at the NLRB through a recess appointment. Now that he's established at the head of an agency responsible for overseeing American labor law, Becker is poised to expand Big Labor's privileges even further.

Faced with apparent conflicts of interests brought to light by the National Right to Work Foundation, Becker quickly downplayed any connection to the SEIU, his longtime employer. Despite crafting legal strategies on behalf of that union for much of his career, Becker refused to recuse himself from several NLRB cases involving the SEIU's local affiliates.

Despite his relatively brief tenure, Becker's biases are already evident. In one recent case, Becker wrote that the board should consider waiving rules that require union bosses to provide workers with independently audited breakdowns of union expenditures.

On National Review Online, Mix outlined union militants' stealth to bypass Congress to implement radical changes to labor law that grant new special privileges to union bosses at the expense of hardworking Americans:

By cramming the NLRB full of forced-unionism operatives, Obama has successfully laid the groundwork for a stealthy push to undermine the rights of American workers. The NLRB’s administrative agenda and electronic-voting schemes now threaten to undo much of the hard work that went into defeating card-check legislation.

Some doubt that such sweeping changes could be enacted without congressional approval, but we’ve already seen Big Labor’s strategy in action. The National Mediation Board (NMB), a federal agency that governs airline and railway employees, has just enacted a far-reaching rule change that allows for workplace unionization without the consent of a true majority of employees.

Mix exposed Big Labor's plot to monopolize government-sector workers in the Washington Times:

The outsized power and privileges of government union bosses clearly are a major force behind the unsustainable growth of government payrolls. According to data furnished by respected labor economists Barry T. Hirsch and David A. Macpherson, nonunion government employment nationwide actually fell by 2 percent, but Big Labor-controlled government employment grew by nearly 4 percent from 2007 to 2009.

Government union bosses' success in expanding the ranks of employees under their monopoly bargaining power - even as private-sector and nonunion government payrolls have shrunk - spells trouble for the future of the American economy. Our country simply must reverse the long-term trend in which the growth of government-union employment far exceeds that of private-sector employment in good and bad times alike.

Otherwise, American taxpayers and businesses are destined to face ever-more-onerous tax burdens to pay for bigger and bigger government in the decades to come.

Finally, in local newspapers nationwide including the Duluth News Tribune, Mix warned that no worker is safe from the union moguls' designs:

Take Major Stephen Godin, a retired Marine who has instructed ROTC in Worcester, MA, for 15 years. Major Godin’s dedicated service to his country and his students deserves our respect and gratitude.

But three months ago, Massachusetts Teachers Association union officials threatened his dismissal for not paying union dues, even though he is not a member of the union. Because Massachusetts lacks a Right to Work law making union association strictly voluntary, nonmembers can be forced to pay some fees to a union as a condition of employment.

Public outcry prompted the governor to exempt ROTC instructors from forced-dues requirements, but other teachers across the state still labor under compulsory unionism.

Mark Mix also appeared on nationally syndicated and local radio shows coast-to-coast.

In an op-ed this week in the Washington Examiner, National Right to Work President Mark Mix discusses the threat to real education reform posed by teacher union bosses in Washington, DC.

Just a few weeks ago, Samuel Johnson’s centuries-old observation that a man’s knowledge he is to be hanged “concentrates his mind wonderfully” seemed quite applicable to Washington Teacher Union (WTU) President George Packer.

Of course, no one was threatening Packer with the rope or any of its modern-day equivalents when they agreed to a new contract in late June making it significantly easier for D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee to dismiss ineffective teachers.

But when he signed off on the new contract, Packer, whose WTU is a subsidiary of the mammoth American Federation of Teachers (AFT) union, faced a Big Labor boss’s worst nightmare, a rapid decline in the number of employees forced to pay to his union dues or fees in order to keep their jobs.

As recently as 2003, there were roughly 5,000 D.C. teachers who had to accept the WTU as their monopoly-bargaining agent and pay union dues or fees as a job condition. Today, there are barely 4,000. Despite the best efforts of Packer and AFT union czarina Randi Weingarten, that number is set to drop still further over the next few years.

Read the full op-ed here.

Over the years, National Right to Work Foundation attorneys have provided free legal aid to teachers whose rights have been violated by compulsory unionism.  Read about some of these cases here, here, and here.

From the San Jose Mercury News, here's an excellent op-ed from retired teacher Larry Sand on forced teacher union dues:

So why does CTA not let its members decide if they want to contribute to CTA's various political funds? It is simply because the union knows that if these donations were voluntary, the vast majority of teachers wouldn't contribute a penny.

So does CTA really care about the needs and opinions of its teachers, or does it just see its members as convenient ATMs to further its own political agenda?

Teachers should closely examine whether they want to continue giving their hard-earned money to candidates and causes in which they have no interest or find repellent. And CTA needs to fess up to its arrogant attitude that it knows what's best for teachers, when, in fact, what teachers actually think about various issues is of no concern to it.

As Sand notes, even if teachers opt-out of dues for union political activism, they're still forced to pay over $700 annually in so-called "agency fees" to teacher union bosses. And even that's no guarantee that their money won't be used to fund union political activism - as many Foundation-assisted employees can attest, union officials often funnel forced dues collected for "workplace bargaining" to union-backed political causes. 

The solution, of course, is for California to adopt a Right to Work law, which would make all union dues strictly voluntary. Right to Work laws ensure that union officials only accept voluntary contributions from all employees, including public school teachers. 

In a political culture in which most politicians fear Big Labor's massive forced dues electioneering machine, it's refreshing to see an elected official articulately and passionately condemn compulsory unionism.  That's just what New Jersey Governor Chris Christie did last week at a town hall meeting.

In the video below, listen to Gov. Christie explain the evil of forcing teachers to pay union fees (roughly 85 percent of full union dues) just to exercise their right to refrain from union membership. 

New Jersey employees have the limited right -- secured by National Right to Work Foundation-won cases at the US Supreme Court -- to pay only the portion of the fees that union bosses can prove is spent on bargaining and contract administration.  

In Abood v. Detroit Board of Education (1977), the Court ruled that compulsory dues for politics violates the First Amendment.  In Chicago Teachers Union v. Hudson (1986), the Court agreed with Foundation attorneys and unanimously held that union officials must provide employees with an independently verified breakdown of the union's expenditures and that employees must have the opportunity to challenge the calculation of their forced fees.

Unfortunately, Christie stops short of calling for the Garden State to pass a Right to Work law, which would make union association 100 percent voluntary.  But he's right on when he explains that the teacher union officials are motivated by "the accumulation and exercise of raw political power."  Something to think about as Congress considers rewriting states' employment laws by federal fiat.

At Freedom@Work, we've spent plenty of time documenting the many problems of public sector forced unionism, including the fiscal abyss it is plunging state and local governments into. But even reports of an impending budget crisis don't have quite the same impact as a video of teacher union militants demanding more tax dollars:

As George Will notes in his latest Newsweek column, eventually, the bills come due. California's looming budget crisis is largely the result of public sector union bosses, whose profligate spending risks pushing the entire state into bankruptcy:

California's parlous condition owes much to burdensome health-care and pension promises negotiated with public employees' unions, promises that are suffocating the state's economic growth.

. . .
They [public sector unions] are government organized as an interest group to lobby itself for ever-larger portions of wealth extracted by the taxing power from the private sector.

Unfortunately, this trend threatens to spread other states. For the first time ever, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that public sector unionization outstrips private sector unionization, as Big Labor increasingly turns to government to bolster its forced-dues-paying ranks. The financial consequences of this development could be dire (emphasis mine):

Fred Siegel, a visiting professor of history at St. Francis College in Brooklyn and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute . . . said, “There were enormous political ramifications” to the fact that public-sector workers are now the majority in organized labor.

“At the same time the country is being squeezed, public-sector unions are a rising political force in the Democratic Party,” he said. “They depend on extra money for the public sector,and that puts the Democrats in a difficult position. In four big states — New York, New Jersey, Illinois and California — the public-sector unions have largely been untouched by the economic downturn. In those states, you have an impending clash between the public-sector unions and the public at large.”

As union operatives become more entrenched at every level of government their immense special privileges allow them to corral more money for extortionate dues payments. As a result, taxes go up and public services become more expensive, leaving over-burdened taxpayers to foot the bill.

The latest Big Labor scheme to accelerate this trend is the Police and Firefighters Monopoly Bargaining Bill, which which would leave state and local public safety employees at the mercy of Big Labor organizing drives. Once Big Labor bosses are firmly in control of public safety organizations, they'll be able to use their influence over firefighters and police departments to further entrench their monopoly bargaining powers. 

Here's an update on the case of Sean Beightol, a veteran Miami chemistry teacher denied access to private counsel at a school disciplinary hearing.

Although union members are allowed to consult with advisers from the United Teachers of Dade (UTD) union during similar proceedings, school administrators prevented Beightol from bringing an adviser from his voluntary teacher association to the meeting, a clear-cut case of workplace discrimination against nonunion teachers.

Foundation attorneys responded by filing charges on Beightol's behalf with the Florida Public Employee Relations Commission, which issued an official complaint last week against the union and the local Miami-Dade school district. The complaints against the union and the school district can be found here and here; the Employee Relations Commission will now investigate the matter to determine school and union officials' culpability.

To paraphrase our press release on the charges, the discriminatory work rule Beightol challenged is nothing more than a tool to discourage teachers from leaving the union and enrolling in a voluntary teachers association.

A victory for Beightol would end this discriminatory practice and stop union officials from undermining Florida's popular Right to Work law.