Mailer encourages Washington state teachers to stop paying their union dues and ‘save up to $1,200’
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When Seattle teacher Alice Lippitt checked the mail last week, she was puzzled by a flyer she found.
“What the heck?” she said she remembers thinking. “How did they find my address?”
At first glance, the flyer, sent to thousands of Washington teachers over the holidays, looks like a last-chance sale advertisement from a department store.
It was actually an invitation from a conservative think tank to “save up to $1,200” by opting out of paying membership dues to the Washington Education Association (WEA), the statewide teacher’s union.
“Give yourself a raise this Christmas and every Christmas to come!” it reads.
The mailers are part of a wider and litigious political battle between the state’s labor unions and the Freedom Foundation, an Olympia-based conservative think tank, whose website says the group is “working to reverse the stranglehold government unions have” on state and local policy. Using information gleaned from public records requests, the Foundation has also knocked on doors and sent emails to public employees notifying them of their right to opt out of paying dues under a 2018 ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court in Janus v. AFSCME.
Reached by phone last week, Jami Lund, the Foundation’s senior policy analyst, said the communications are intended to place a check on the power of unions, keep them accountable and prevent them from “overcharging” their members. He added that some public employees, including those who are conservative, don’t want to fund union activities they don’t agree with and feel pressured to be “in lockstep.”
WEA, a formidable lobbying force with close to 100,000 members, has been aware of the group’s efforts for years. A post on the union’s blog advises members to ignore the Foundation’s “annoying tactics.”
“We see it as nothing but an attempt to harass and intimidate school employees,” said Rich Wood, a WEA spokesman.
Anyone get this anti-union, Scrooge, mailer for Christmas?
They r trying to get educators to drop out of @OurVoiceWEA—giving up the collective bargaining rights that won us the raises & rights we have received.
They should have donated the $$ spent on the mailer to schools!
The Foundation is a nonprofit and member of the State Policy Network, an alliance of conservative think tanks, some of which are engaged in similar anti-union marketing campaigns, The Guardian and The Intercept reported.
One mailer from the Foundation obtained by The Guardian said, “The consequences of a favorable ruling [in the Janus case] are huge. Imagine tens, even hundreds, of millions of dollars currently used to push damaging CONTINUE READING: Mailer encourages Washington state teachers to stop paying their union dues and ‘save up to $1,200’ | The Seattle Times
