The recent experiences of Florida and Arkansas show that, when government stops impeding American educators’ exit from teacher unions, many will leave them.
In 2023, with the support of the National Right to Work Committee, Florida and Arkansas adopted laws that ended the practice of automatically deducting union dues from the paychecks of many public employees.
Now these civil servants only pay union dues if they actively choose to.
Before these laws were passed, union bosses were able to hinder public employees from exercising their First Amendment right to end all financial support for Big Labor.
Workers often didn’t know how much money they were paying, and stopping the diversion of dues money from their paychecks to the union could take as long as a full year.
But now teachers, and most other state and local public employees, in Florida are protected from such abuses.
National Right to Work Committee Vice President John Kalb commented:
“Though it is sadly not comprehensive, the results of Florida’s 2023 reform have been dramatic.
“According to the most recent federal LM-2 financial disclosure form it had filed at press time, the Florida Education Association [FEA/NEA] teacher union has lost 15% of its dues-paying members since 2023.
“In absolute terms, FEA membership has fallen by over 20,000.
“Meanwhile, the FEA’s dues revenue has fallen by 14%.
“Partly as a result of sharp membership declines, many Florida government unions have been decertified.”
While Arkansas’s ban on automatic payroll deductions is more narrow than Florida’s, covering only teacher union bosses, its impact on the Natural State’s National Education Association subsidiary has been dramatic.
Mr. Kalb pointed to a recentlypublished analysis by Maxford Nelson of the Freedom Foundation of the Arkansas Education Association’s [AEA/NEA] 990 forms filed with the IRS.
Mr. Nelson reported that, in the first year after the automatic payroll deduction ban, AEA bosses’ dues revenue fell from $2.11 million to $1.35 million. That’s a decline of 36%!
Mr. Kalb explained: “One reason why vast numbers of educators cease bankrolling an NEA-affiliated union once they have a practicable right not to do so is that they have no desire to finance Big Labor bosses’ political and ideological causes.
“Why should struggling teachers give a portion of their hard-earned pay to a union that spends much of its money promoting an array of causes the teachers don’t even care about?
“Of course, not all of the money taken from the paychecks of hardworking teachers goes toward funding partisan politics and lobbying.
“Some of it is simply stolen to line the pockets of union fat cats! In October, for example, the president and vice president of the teachers union in Duval, Fla. pled guilty to embezzling a total of $2.6 million from rank-and-file duespayers.”
The most important single solution for all such skullduggery is the repeal of all state laws authorizing and promoting union monopoly bargaining in public employment.
But eliminating taxpayer-funded collections of union dues, even in states that have already, as Arkansas did in 2021, substantially rolled back government-sector Big Labor monopoly bargaining, is an important and necessary step.
That’s why the Committee helped mobilize support for the passage of automatic payroll deduction bans in Florida and Arkansas, as well as several other states, including West Virginia and Tennessee.
And that’s why the Committee is now supporting ongoing efforts to pass new automatic payroll deduction bans in states like Idaho and Oklahoma.
Mr. Kalb concluded: “Eliminating government union bosses’ special privileges leaves them with a clear choice: If they want their organizations to survive, they must provide services that people are willing to pay for. They must root out fraud and graft from their ranks.
“And they must refrain from political advocacy that their members find irrelevant, if not repugnant.”
This article was originally published in our monthly newsletter. Go here to access previous newsletter posts.
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"[Spanberger] voted twice for the so-called ‘PRO Act,’ which would have destroyed the Virginia and every other state Right to Work law, and cosponsored it one last time before stepping down to run for governor."
“Jewish teachers must allow NEA union bosses who evidently loathe them to speak for them on all matters concerning their pay, benefits, and work rules!”
“The fact is, openly socialist American politicians like U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders [IVt.], U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez [D-N.Y.], and now Zohran Mamdani also turn out to be rabid advocates of corralling workers into unions.