Tag: AFT

Biden-Harris Admin Handed Billions to Coalition Partnering with Stacey Abrams’ Organization Dedicated to Turning Out Voters

Daily Caller News Foundation
Stacey Abrams

The Biden-Harris Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) doled out billions of taxpayer dollars in August to a left-wing nonprofit consortium linked to Democratic voter mobilization efforts, including a Stacey Abrams’ get-out-the-vote initiative based in Georgia.

The EPA announced that Power Forward Communities (PFC) received $2 billion under the Inflation Reduction Act’s (IRA) $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF) on Aug. 16. The PFC is partnering with an array of Democratic Party-affiliated groups in addition to the two-time Georgia governor candidate Abrams’ Fair Count, including the nation’s largest teachers union—a major contributor to Democratic candidates—and a prominent climate activist group, according to a review of the PFC’s website.

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Mastriano Proposes Bill for Pennsylvania School Curriculum Transparency

Bradley Vasoli

Pennsylvania state Senator Doug Mastriano (R-Gettysburg) this week announced he is introducing legislation requiring public K-12 schools to post their curricula online. 

Should the policy become law, school districts and charter institutions must provide public web access to syllabi for all classes and thorough lists of the textbooks planned for use in those courses as well as commonwealth academic standards for all course offerings. Should a school make any curricular revisions, it would have 30 days to publish them. 

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Gov. Shapiro’s Pennsylvania Budget Proposal Rewards Union Donors

Bradley Vasoli

Unions donated copiously to Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro (D) during last year’s gubernatorial campaign and they’ll reap a handsome reward if the legislature approves a particular item in Shapiro’s proposed budget. 

The Fiscal Year 2023-24 spending plan includes a $1,274,000 initiative to increase by one-third the number of labor law compliance investigators at the commonwealth’s Department of Labor and Industry. The text of Shapiro’s proposal expresses concern that more labor cases need to be probed and that businesses need more education on workers’ right to organize. 

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Teacher Union Boss Randi Weingarten in Ukraine This Week, Says She’s Heading to Border to ‘Assess the Situation’ Following Missile Strikes

Admin

American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten is in Ukraine this week to meet with Ukrainian students and teachers and “to offer solidarity and support” to Ukrainian students and teachers “amid heinous attacks on Democracy,” according to the AFT website.

The Ukrainian teachers union, the Trade Union of Education and Science Workers, invited the AFT reportedly, “to bear witness and call attention to the effects on children, families and educators and the impact of Russia’s attacks on democracy and democratic institutions.”

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Major Government Unions Lose over 200K Members

The Center Square

The top four public labor unions in the U.S. lost hundreds of thousands of members since a 2018 Supreme Court case that ruled government employees could not be forced to pay a union to keep their job, a new report shows that.

The Commonwealth Foundation released the report, which found that the top four public labor unions – AFT, AFSCME, NEA, and SEIU – lost nearly 219,000 members altogether since the Janus v. AFSCME ruling.

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Oversight Republicans Investigate Why DOE Hasn’t Spent COVID Relief Funds, Role of Teachers Unions

The Center Square

Oversight Republicans have launched an investigation into how the U.S. Department of Education has handled billions of COVID-19 relief dollars, raising the alarm about the major learning loss experienced by students.

Republicans on the House Oversight Committee sent a letter to Department of Education Secretary Miguel Cardona demanding documents and answers as to why most of the money has reportedly remained unspent.

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Commentary: Four Years after Landmark Janus Decision, Connecticut Teachers’ Unions Membership Dropping

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Mark Janus

While the media breathlessly covered the final two weeks of this year’s term at the U.S. Supreme Court, an important anniversary quietly came and went — the fourth year of freedom from forced union participation by public-sector employees.

On June 27, 2018, the justices banned mandatory union membership, dues and fees for government employees, overturning more than 40 years of court precedent that required government employee union participation as a condition of employment.

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Public Sector Unions Make Up Half of All Union Membership

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Washington DC

by Richard McCarty   Public sector unions have long exploited taxpayers by pushing for higher taxes, higher spending, and generous benefits and extravagant pensions for government workers while opposing measures to hold bureaucrats accountable. Fortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court’s Janus decision, which gave government workers a choice of whether to belong to a public employee union, has started to erode some of these unions’ excessive power. Yet much work remains to be done to make government bureaucracies more efficient and responsive to elected officials and to the public. Although the public sector is much smaller than the private sector, public sector union members make up nearly half of all union members. In fact, of the nation’s 14.8 million union members, there are 7.2 million public sector union members and 7.6 million private sector union members. The near parity between public sector union membership and private sector union membership is only possible because the union membership rate is more than five times higher in the public sector than in the private sector: 34.4 percent of the public sector is unionized while only 6.5 percent of the private sector is unionized. The five largest public employee unions, which claim to represent several million current and former government workers, are the National Education Association…

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Commentary: Freedom to Choose

JC Bowman

In addition to excellent legal protection, professional learning, networking and career resources, along with opportunities for leadership, there is no doubt that joining a professional organization that benefits educators. Our advocacy efforts carry significant weight with legislators, and other policymakers. We choose to collaborate, not separate, which is a natural choice for a group that is member-owned and member-driven.

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Letter to the Editor: Mandatory Union Dues Fund Leftist Causes at the Expense of Conservative Union Members

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Tennessee Star

  Dear Tennessee Star, It really is simple the more members who pay union dues affords greater political clout for that union and feed the union bureaucracy. Most people still have a lot to learn about unions, especially in education. Many have likened unions to being an ATM to left-wing politicians and causes. Too many people vaguely equate the union with that classroom teacher whom they know and respect, not with the hard-as-nails political entity that dictates bad school policy. It makes little sense for teachers to contribute their hard-earned dollars to political and ideological causes they oppose. For example, a teacher union’s goal, of course, is political power, not education. This means of course they funnel union money to politicians who support their agenda. So how do the government unions, whose leaders run to the left of the average worker, get away with spending dues dollars on candidates and causes that so many of its members revile? The answer very simply is because its members let them. In fact, in all elections since 1989, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) has given $76,446,797 to Democrats and liberals and just $363,000 to Republicans and conservatives. In other words, less than…

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