Considering the record electioneering by Big Labor in 2008, it should be no surprise that union bosses were well-represented at this week’s convention. NEA President Reg Weaver was one of the many union officials awarded for his union’s political expenditures with a prime speaking slot.

Larry Sand, a teacher for 27 years and former NEA member, sent Weaver an e-mail after listening to a gross misrepresentation of reality in Weaver’s DNC speech:

In the first paragraph you say, "I am here today on behalf of 3.2 million NEA members to tell you why we support Barack Obama for President of the United States." Wait a minute. It sounds as if all 3.2 million members of the NEA are supporting Obama. Then in the last sentence, you leave no doubt. "That, my friends, is why the 3.2 million members of the National Education Association are organized, energized and mobilized to help elect Barack Obama as the next president of the United States of America." This last statement is an outrage.

You have been quoted on more than one occasion that "the NEA is one-third Republican," which means that there are over one million Republican NEA members. It is audacity of the highest order to state unequivocally that these people will be "organized, energized and mobilized" to vote for a Democrat. I have been a classroom teacher for over 27 years and for many of those an NEA member, before resigning from the "Association" several years ago. I would strongly urge you to issue an apology to those Republicans still in the NEA and the American public in general for what really is a ludicrous statement.

If Weaver ever gets around to apologizing, he shouldn’t only do so to the million-plus members who are Republicans since as many more are independents. Not to mention the countless Democrats who aren’t in lockstep with the radical agenda of Weaver and the NEA’s top brass — many who may not even be supporters of Reg Weaver’s presidential pick. And remember, these teachers are forced to finance the NEA’s political activism.

As it happens, Mark Mix, President of the National Right to Work Foundation, has an op-ed on the problems of teacher union monopoly power in today’s Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. Also check out this column in the Providence Journal from Gary Beckner, executive director of the Association of American Educators, a nonprofit professional teachers association that is entirely voluntary.

On behalf of the Foundation, I’d like to wish everyone a safe and happy Labor Day weekend. While I hope everyone enjoys their day off, now seems like an appropriate time to flag Foundation President Mark Mix’s statement commemorating the occasion. Here’s an excerpt:

“Meanwhile, many workers feel they have little choice but to pay for organized labor’s billion-dollar 2008 election campaign, and many workers are unaware of their right to object. That’s why the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation is providing free legal aid to thousands of employees nationwide seeking to get their money back. In fact, in October Foundation attorneys will argue their fourteenth case accepted by the U.S. Supreme Court – a case which defends the right of workers to refuse to pay for union activism using their mandatory union dues.

“This Labor Day, we commend those courageous American workers who are standing up to union intimidation, harassment, and even violence as they defend their cherished freedoms of conscience, speech, and association. And we work toward the day when no American is forced to pay tribute to an unwanted union.”

Read the rest of the statement (and download it as an Mp3) here or simply play the YouTube below from the Foundation’s YouTube channel:

Workers from across the country have received free legal assistance from the National Right to Work Foundation. Now they’re speaking out to encourage others to stand up for their rights in this latest Right to Work video:

As always, check back at the Foundation’s YouTube channel for more Right to Work video updates. Many of the workers featured in this week’s segment have appeared in previous Foundation video interviews describing their stories in greater detail.

Today, the Wall Street Journal editorialized on the fact that Big Labor “has won the intellectual battle for control of the Democratic Party and is reasserting its agenda in a way not seen since the 1970’s.” The WSJ notes Big Labor’s political influence, especially within the Democratic Party, has been steadily increasing over the years.

At the top of Big Labor’s agenda is, of course, more compulsory unionism privileges to force workers into dues-paying union ranks:

[R]ewriting federal law to promote union organizing is now near the top of the Democratic agenda. The main vehicle is "card check" legislation, which would eliminate the requirement for secret ballots in union elections. Unable to organize workers when employees can vote in privacy, unions want to expose those votes to peer pressure, and inevitably to public intimidation. This would arguably be the biggest change to federal labor law since the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947. The Democratic House passed card check last year, and Mr. Obama has pledged his support. With a few more Senators, it might pass.

Card check is merely the start. Next on the agenda is a campaign to repeal "right to work" laws in the 22 U.S. states that have them. Right to work laws allow employees to decide for themselves whether to join or financially support a union. Former Michigan Congressman David Bonior told a union event in Denver on Monday that limiting right to work laws is essential both to lifting union membership and promoting more Democratic political victories.

Last week, the New York Times reported that Manhattan Federal District Court Judge Charles S. Haight Jr. ordered a one-year continuation of governmental oversight of the New York City carpenters’ union, citing recent bribery convictions of several local bosses, extensive off-the-books work, and an incident where union militants beat up a worker outside a Catholic school until he was unconscious (because he had the gall to challenge the insiders in a union election).

The union has spent the last 14 years under government supervision after signing a consent decree in a civil racketeering case alleging organized crime figures were favored for high-pay but no-show jobs. Regardless, union officials felt it necessary to argue in court that they do not need supervision. Their thugs all but erased any chance of that when they assaulted a dissident candidate.

Judge Haight agreed with the United States attorney’s argument that supervision would end when the union’s corruption had been eradicated. However, as blogger Warner Todd Huston noted, “The judge did mention that the union had done better since it originally went into government oversight, but that it is way too early to claim that the Mob influence and corruption is excised from the union.”

Indeed, the only reliable way to end this union corruption would be to end compulsory unionism.

A few Right to Work-related updates from around the web:

1.) The Heritage Foundation’s Foundry blog helpfully summarizes the corruption allegations surrounding Tyrone Freeman, head of California’s SEIU chapter. What’s worse, union mismanagement goes all the way to the top. According to the LA Times, SEIU national brass received word of Freeman’s corrupt practices six years ago and still failed to act. (This is the same local union against which Foundation attorneys won a federal court settlement securing the return of almost $10 million in illegally seized forced union dues.)

Read the whole entry here.

2.) The New York Sun featured a great editorial yesterday on union bosses’ half-hearted efforts at workplace "representation." Money quote:

But even as unions promote counterproductive economic policies, and push for legislation allowing them to essentially force more workers into their ranks, a look at union finances shows that many unions aren’t looking after the members they already have — especially their retirement plans.

The Sheet Metal Workers International Union says prominently on its Web site that "Union Members Have Strong Retirement Plans."

But it turns out — as disclosed in unions’ mandatory annual financial reports to the Labor Department — that the Sheet Metal workers’ union pension plan is underfunded and so risks the future pensions promised to its members. Many other union pension plans are in similar straits.

This isn’t an isolated incident, either. Check out the rest of the article for an in-depth look at the glaring disparity between union bosses’ lavish salaries and the shortfalls facing rank-and-file workers’ pension funds.

3.) Townhall.com has an article up on unions’ efforts to ram the misleadingly-titled "Employee Free Choice Act" down workers’ throats. The piece also mentions the Foundation’s efforts to hold the SEIU accountable for a questionable political fundraising scheme:

In fact, alleged coercion for political gain is already occurring. Recently, The Wall Street Journal reported that the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation asked the Department of Justice to investigate the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). The basis for the request centers on this fact:

“The union adopted a new amendment to its constitution at last month’s SEIU convention, requiring that every local contribute an amount equal to $6 per member per year to the union’s national political action committee. This is in addition to regular union dues. Unions that fail to meet the requirement must contribute an amount in ‘local union funds’ equal to the ‘deficiency’ plus a 50% penalty.” (The Wall Street Journal, 7/28/08)

Can you name any other company or organization that could compel its membership to fund political organizations that rank and file membership may or may not agree with?

For more information on the Foundation’s efforts to deter illegal union campaign fundraising, check out here, here, and here.

The Las Vegas Sun recently published the story of Anishya Sanders, a hard-working single mother exploited by Big Labor to push for the Card Check Forced Unionism bill (aka the misnamed “Employee Free Choice Act”).

Union bosses flew her to Capitol Hill to testify in support of the union power grab and let her live the limosine lifestyle of a union boss for a precious few days. Anishya lived it up at suave hotels, private meetings with members of Congress, and celebratory wining and dining on surf-and-turf and merlot at tony DC hot spots.

Things were really turning around for Anishya. She thought she’d finally made it, and she was even promised a good job by the local union boss. However, after returning home things didn’t pan out that way. Eventually, the local union official told the mother of five “your 15 minutes are over” and hung up. She is now homeless and unemployed and concludes that if Big Labor had just left her alone, she would still have a job.

So much for the little guy (or woman, as the case may be)… Once Anishya could no longer help union officials with their latest compulsory unionism power grab, the union bosses kicked her to the curb.

Read the whole sordid tale here.

The July/August 2008 Foundation Action newsletter is now available for download!

In this issue:

• Administration Lawyer Undercuts Another Foundation Case, Abruptly Resigns
• Foundation Pushes to Close Union Disclosure Loopholes
• Union Boss Monopoly Bargaining Rears Ugly Head
• Foundation Victory Reveals Widespread Use of Card-Check
• Foundation Attorneys Expose Shady Union Accounting Scheme
• Planned Giving Strategies Pay Off Now and Later

Download the July/August 2008 Foundation Action in PDF form today. You can sign up for a free subscription to Foundation Action here.

Via the Education Sector’s blog, the Washington Post has an excellent article up on DC School Chancellor Michelle Rhee’s proposal to create a two-tier pay system to allow administrators to reward teacher excellence in the capital’s hidebound public schools.

Rhee’s reforms would permit teachers to forgo tenure in favor of higher pay scales based on student achievement, or choose better job security at lower rates of compensation. Predictably, union bosses are fighting the reform tooth-and-nail because it weakens their education stranglehold:

"It’s degrading and insulting," said Brocks, to ask that teachers give up tenure and go on probation for a year if they choose the more lucrative of the two salary tiers under the plan, which is at the center of contract negotiations between the city and the Washington Teachers’ Union. He said that Rhee wants only to purge older teachers and that for instructors to sell out hard-won protections against arbitrary or unfair dismissal is unthinkable. "For Michelle Rhee or anyone to ask that is like Judas and 30 pieces of silver," Brocks, 59, said.

Apparently it’s "degrading and insulting" to demand accountability from a school system that has been wracked by massive corruption scandals and boasts some of the lowest test scores in the country, even when all that the proposal does is allow individual teachers to have one single choice about the terms of their employment. Here’s the Government Accountability Office’s 2008 report (.pdf) on DC public schools (emphasis mine):

The system serves about 50,000 students and operates 144 schools.1 In fiscal year 2007, its operating budget exceeded $1 billion and the federal government provided funds for about 13 percent of that amount. Long-standing problems with student academic performance, the condition of school facilities, and the overall management of the D.C. school system have been well documented over the last several decades. In particular, the academic challenges facing the District are enormous. In 2007, D.C. public schools ranked last in math scores and second-to-last in reading scores for all tested urban public school systems on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

I particularly enjoyed reading the Education Sector’s response to union intransigence (emphasis mine):

There’s a certain infantilizing quality to this vision of teacher work, where individuals can’t be trusted to make up their own minds about their relationship with management and shouldn’t be allowed to make the tradeoff that virtually all well-compensated professionals make: more accountability and less security in exchange for more recognition and compensation.

. . .

So on the one hand you’ve got an uber-responsive chancellor who reformed the bureaucracy to better support teachers and wants to give them the option to voluntarily enter a system that would pay them a whole lot more money. On the other hand, a union that can’t return emails and is notable chiefly for a history of theft and venality so outrageous that it’s memorable even by the highly attentuated moral standards of DC municipal government.

Ultimately, this boils down to one thing: union boss control over teachers and their paychecks. If DC teachers are permitted to make their own decisions about their terms of employment, even more DC teachers may discover how unfair it is that they are forced to pay dues to union bosses for "representation" they may not they need or want.