Peter Greene has an excellent post today about the groups and individuals who want to eliminate teachers’ unions. Some hate unions, because they impinge on employers’ freedom to pay as little as they want. Some hate them because they fund Democratic candidates. Some don’t want workers to have any voice. Please open the link and read it all.

Greene writes:

If there’s anything true about teachers in unions, it’s that some folks wish they weren’t. And right now, yet another group is trying to sell the idea. But looking at some of the players in this anti-teacher-union space seems like a fine way to celebrate Labor day.

In some states, the tactic has been to simply strip unions of power so that A) they can’t really do anything and B) teachers leave them because they can’t really do anything.

But in other states, the tactic has to try to sell teachers directly on the idea of getting out. We’ve seen a variety of these outfits.

Leave your evil union!

Early entry into the field included Free To Teach, an operation of Americans for fair Treatment, a shell group for Pennsylvania’s right wing Commonwealth Foundation.

There’s the Freedom Foundation, which once bragged that it “has a proven plan for bankrupting and defeating government unions through education, litigation, legislation and community activation … we won’t be satisfied with anything short of total victory against the government union thugs.” Freedom Foundation was founded by the Bradley Foundation, the Koch Foundation, and the Searle Freedom Trust.

Then there’s the Speak Out For Teachers outfit, brought to us by the Center for Union Facts, an anti-union group that was part of the constellation of dark money groups run by Richard Berman, who has long been a down and dirty fighteragainst unions. (They appear to have gone dark themselves a couple years ago)

There’s For Kids and Country, the enterprise of former teacher Rebecca Friedrichs, who was the face of a big anti-teacher-union lawsuit almost a decade ago and has since launched a career as a talking head on the Fox-Breitbart circuit. They have a whole guide on how to talk a teacher into leaving the union.

Or you could have My Pay My Say, the “don’t you want to quit the union” initiative of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a right wing pressure group based in Michigan and so, as you might expect funded with a bunch of DeVos money as well as Walton, Koch and dark money.

The Janus decision, which invented the right of teachers to be free riders in unions, collecting benefits but paying no dues, gave rise to plenty of these groups. They will argue teachers should drop union dues because then they would get more money (spoiler alert: none of these groups or their backers have ever advocated for higher teacher salaries).

There are also anti-union teachers who make arguments like “I could negotiate a better contract for myself if I weren’t tied to this union,” and they are just so cute. Nobody tell them about Santa, either. The anti-union outfits love to cheer these folks on, and they might even get to leave teaching for a cushy thinky tank gig.

But when these groups are not trying to coax teacher away from the union, their purposes are more clear.

The teachers unions (well, all unions, but the teachers have the biggest ones these days) give a whole bunch of money to Democratic politicians, so, the reasoning goes, defund the unions and defund the Democrats. Plus, as a bonus, depower the unions and then teachers don’t get all uppity about decent contracts and working conditions and just generally getting in the way of The People In Charge.

Some of this is just realpolitik gamesmanship, but there are anti-union folks who feel pretty mouth-frothy about this. The narrative for some is that public schools are a scam, a way to funnel money to teachers who in turn funnel it to Democrats and liberals. (In return these “teachers” get a pretend job in which they don’t actually try to educate anyone.) You’ll hear language about how union leaders are “corrupt,” and that Venn diagram shows some overlap with diagram of people who think elections are rigged because those elections allow people to vote who shouldn’t have a say. If you’re of the opinion that society is supposed to have tiers, then teachers unions represent an attempt to exercise power by people who shouldn’t have any, people who refuse to know their place.

Another wing of these anti-union efforts are the anti-union unions, groups that are set up to provide a alternative organization for people who don’t want to go it alone. We’ve had teacher collectives a decade or so ago that were created for the purpose of supporting Common Core and high stakes testing (“See? Teachers think this stuff is great!”) like Educators 4 Excellence et al.

But nowadays the big names are about giving teachers an alternative to AFT and NEA.

Please open the link and read about the organizations created to supplant unions, like the Christian Educators Association and the American Association of Educators.