National Employee Freedom Week reminds workers they have a choice

[August 24, 2015] By M.D. Kittle / August 21, 2015 

MADISON, Wis. — About four years ago, the Nevada Policy Research Institute launched a small campaign to let public school teachers in Las Vegas know they could opt out of membership in their union.

“We were blown away by the number of teachers who called or emailed us and said, ‘Thank you. You mean I can leave? I can get out of there?’” recalled Victor Joecks, executive vice president of the free-market think tank.

Some 800 Las Vegas teachers dropped their union membership. The exodus deprived the labor organization of $600,000 in revenue, Joecks said.

FREEDOM: National Employee Freedom Week aims to spread the word that teachers and workers everywhere have a choice when it comes to union membership.
Thus began the movement of National Employee Freedom Week, a nationwide effort to inform union employees about the “freedoms they have to opt out of union membership and let them make the decision that’s best for them.”

Employee Freedom Week runs through Saturday.

In 2013, 65 free-market organizations and alternative teachers groups joined the movement to spread the word. Last year, 81 organizations signed on, and this year, 101 got involved. Ten states are running opt-out campaigns, informing workers about their choices and targeting teachers unions.

The message, Joecks said, is akin to President Obama’s pledge (although Obama’s promise turned out to be a lie) on Obamacare. In this case, if you like your union, you can keep your union. But if you don’t, you are free under the law to leave.

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Joecks said a lot of workers don’t know their rights.

An Employee Freedom Week poll found 39 percent of workers surveyed said they had no idea they had the option to opt out of their union. And 28 percent said they would break up with their union if they could do so without penalty.

The campaign has found that breaking up isn’t so hard to do when union members know they have a choice.

The Michigan-based Mackinac Center for Public Policy launched an opt-out campaign last year. More than 5,000 teachers left the Michigan Education Association. Michigan has become a right-to-work state, and the Mackinac Center’s information campaign over the past two years has helped drive home employees’ rights under the law.

MEA has desperately tried to hold on to its fleeing members, going as far as quietly changing its address for those who choose to opt out of union membership, according to the Mackinac Center.

“This is a desperate ploy from the MEA to continue its agenda of money over members, power over principle and cash over colleagues,” Patrick Wright, the center’s vice president for legal affairs, told Washington Examiner. “Rather than trying to win over members by selling itself, the MEA is essentially playing ‘Simon Says’ with those who want to leave. It’s ludicrous for the MEA to try to trick people who want to leave by switching a post office box number.”

The union has said the address was published in its member publication in June, and that it is on the MEA website. If teachers send their notices to the wrong address, they’ll be directed to the correct one, according to the association.

Joecks said he believes National Employee Freedom Week will ultimately lead to better unions providing better service to customers who expect better.

“What campaigns like this do is make a union look back and say, ‘We really have to represent our members now,” he said. “Ironically, this will make stronger, more committed unions.”