Teachers, here’s a pop quiz. How will you receive information trying to convince you to drop ties with the teachers union? (a) Email. (b) Snail mail. (c) Phone call. (d) Knock on your door. The correct answer is (e) Any or all of the above.
The Public School Wrecking Crew scored a huge win when the Supreme Court decided public-employee unions cannot make nonmembers contribute to collective bargaining in its recent Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees decision. The ink was barely dry on the written arguments when right wing money began pouring into campaigns to persuade teachers to walk away from their unions.
Right-leaning think tanks and advocacy organizations have placed anti-union ads on Google and social media and sent targeted emails to teachers across the country. Some plan to go door to door to reach educators during the summer.
One group is trying to uses states’ open records laws to get the email addresses of union members to make targeting even easier.
Two groups spearheading the campaign are The Mackinac Center and The Freedom Foundation. Both have strong libertarian, “free market” leanings. That puts them in the same ideological camp, and funding stream, as UA’s “Freedom Center,” which created the high school course, Philosophy 101: Ethics, Economy, and Entrepreneurship, currently on hold in TUSD, though it’s still being taught in other local school districts as well as charter and private schools. (To give you the complete buzz word, dog whistle experience, the center’s full name is the Center for the Philosophy of Freedom. It is housed in the recently created Department of Political Economy & Moral Science.)
Let’s look at the two groups funding the anti-union push.
First, the Mackinac Center. Based in Michigan, it’s one of the largest state-level “think tanks” in the country. It receives direct and indirect funding from the Koch brothers, making it a sucker on the Kochtopus, the gigantic, many-tentacled denizen of the Dark Money deep. It has also received $355,000 from the Dick and Betsy DeVos Family Foundation and other conservative donors. Among the causes it supports are: Right to work legislation (Janus was a huge win); Opposition to environmental policies and regulations; Denial of climate change; Opposition to renewable energy; Privatizing prisons; and Privatizing education.
The Mackinac Center has a strong connection to the Flint, Michigan, water contamination which increased the lead level in the city’s water supply, causing serious health, educational and psychological problems for the city’s children which will last the rest of their lives, as well as the rest of the citizenry. The Mackinac Center wrote the legislation adopted by Michigan which created state-appointed emergency managers. When the state says a city is in financial distress, it appoints managers who have nearly total control over the cities. One of the emergency managers appointed by Gov. Rick Snyder oversaw the changes in Flint’s water supply which resulted in lead leaching into the water which feeds into homes and businesses.
The Freedom Foundation is a libertarian think tank based in Washington state. Like the Mackinac Center, it has connections to the Koch network along with a number of other donors, including the Walton Family Foundation which I wrote about in a recent post. The Freedom Foundation’s attacks on unions have been so unrelenting, it was given an award in 2017 by the State Policy Network for “Best Issue Campaign, Union Opt Out Campaign.” It also stakes out positions against LGBT rights, Planned Parenthood, climate change science, and policies helping working families like minimum wage, paid sick days and funding for education.
The anti-teachers union campaign is up and running, fueled by a small group of billionaires who buy “free speech” by the tanker load, with no more strain on their pocketbooks than the rest of us buying an ice cream cone.
This article appears in Jul 12-18, 2018.
Managers taking over city operations and introducing changes that create damage to those using public services: would that be like HT Sanchez taking over TUSD and introducing a reduce class sizes policy that used Title 1 funding to create new teaching positions that in south and west side schools could not be filled with qualified teachers, positions which are now filled with low-hourly-wage, no-benefits subs?
If so, who is responsible? The Kochs (!!!!), no doubt. Certainly not the previous Board majority in TUSD, good *progressive* Democrats, all three.
How effective is the teachers union in TUSD? Why does it have such low membership rates?
Ive heard former TUSD teachers say that it was their perception that in that district brown nosing union reps led to getting teaching jobs in some of the better schools in the district, but it did nothing in the way of genuine wage advocacy across the board.
Unions need to earn members by their achievements for workers. They do not need to be guaranteed membership whether or not they serve the common interests of all employees. Why should those who dont benefit pay into unions that exist more as crony / patronage networks than as advocates for all?
As usual, this blog is a reliable source of Party orthodoxy (Unions good! Rich people bad!) that achieves little or nothing in the way of analysis or reporting on real conditions at the ground level.
Yeah. So?
Mackinac and Goldwater are essentially the same bunch funded by the same corporate interests to privitize public services. Yes they are responsible for Flint. Now the AG of Michigan (who just happens to be running for governor) is persecuting DEQ staff members to take the focus off those really responsible,the governor, the AG himself, the one party gerrymandered legislature ( one guess who) and Mackinac/Goldwater who rammed this mess through.
Could you cite an example where the Freedom Foundation took an official position on Planned Parenthood, climate change or LGBT rights? I can’t, and I’ve worked here for seven years. Contrary to popular myth, the organization has never concerned itself with these issues.
As for minimum wages and paid sick days, no one here objects to people earning more money, either. The question is whether requiring every employer to provide these benefits when their bottom line may not permit it costs jobs and limits opportunities for young, unskilled workers to acquire them.
Likewise, it seems totally dishonest to label someone as an opponent of education funding just because they would prefer plans that enrich students, not teachers’ unions.
Then again, how much credibility can you give to a story when its author couldn’t be bothered to pick up the phone and call the people he’s writing about?
I am the president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. I am unaware that my organization wrote the legislation claimed in this post. Perhaps your author should have contacted the Mackinac Center. Please cite proof of our having authored the aforementioned legislation or retract the claim by publishing a correction. I’m sure you are responsible journalists. Thank you.
Joe Lehman
Never happen.
Gee, David. Looks like you got caught with your pants down.
Not again David. Really?
Old Joe can split hairs all he wants over the Michigan EM law. The fact is the EM law was repealed by referendum. Not one month later another EM law was passed and amazingly they made it bullet or referendum proof. These people, like in Arizona, are afraid of the people approving law or making their own laws. And Mackinac offered all of their policy assistance on the new EM law, and the various privatization schemes that they claimed was going to solve all of Detroits, and Flints problems. Of course he doesn’t mention the financing schemes that went a long way to put Detroit in debt in the first place, or the destruction of Detroits tax base.