Public employees who join a labor union generally expect it to do things like negotiate improvements in pay, benefits or working conditions and to represent them in disciplinary proceedings. What they don’t expect is for their dues to be spent on ideological and political advocacy with a tenuous — at best — connection to the workplace.
Unfortunately, the reality is that government unions too often view the dues members pay for workplace representation as merely a means to an end — namely, advancing militantly progressive social and political goals.
Even in rural, conservative Montana, the values of the state’s largest government union — the Montana Federation of Public Employees (MFPE) — are more aligned with San Francisco socialists than the union’s rank and file.
The Freedom Foundation recently exposed how the MFPE’s professional development program for teachers is rife with woke subject matter and partisan politics, how the books it distributes to school libraries are designed to steep students in progressive ideology, and how MFPE’s partisan political advocacy skews overwhelmingly to the left.
A close review of MFPE’s most recent annual financial disclosure for 2023-24 on file with the U.S. Department of Labor, known as a Form LM-2, provides still more examples of MFPE using members’ dues for controversial, far-left purposes and reinforces the need for Montana policymakers to limit government subsidies for these kinds of progressive organizations.
MFPE paid $7,000 to indigenous academic, activist and neo-Marxist Cornel Pewewardy for a “book tour.”
Pewewardy is the author of, Unsettling Settler-Colonial Education: The Transformational Indigenous Praxis Model (2022), a book designed to turn educators against capitalism and Western civilization by encouraging and exploiting feelings of guilt for past atrocities against native peoples they themselves had no hand in.
The book advances an educational framework called the “Transformational Indigenous Praxis Model” (TIPM), which is intended to counter “settler colonialism,” described as “a system of oppression in which a colonizing nation engages in ethnic cleansing by displacing and dispossessing a native or pre-existing population.” One reviewer described Pewewardy’s book as “a roadmap for educators to decolonize their teaching practices.”
The U.S. Department of Education describes Pewewardy’s TIPM as a challenge to readers “to examine how even the most well-intentioned educators are complicit in reproducing ethnic stereotypes, racist actions, deficit-based ideology, and recolonization.”
Confused about what that actually means? Another reviewer, Jamal Epperson, gives the game away.
Epperson, an assistant director of DEI initiatives at Loyola Marymount University, praised Pewewardy’s book for “[upholding] the importance and tradition of Indigenous ways of knowing” as a way to counteract “White supremacy culture” and “abolish settler colonialism” and its values of “individuality, self-promotion, and neoliberalism” and replace it with “community, love, and reciprocity.”
This is little more than a translation of Marxism into the language of indigenous activism. Not convinced?
In The German Ideology, Karl Marx wrote that when the “destructive forces” of capitalism (“machinery and money,” in his words) are introduced into society,
“…a class is called forth, which has to bear all the burdens of society without enjoying its advantages, which, ousted from society, is forced into the most decided antagonism to all other classes; a class which forms the majority of all members of society, and from which emanates the consciousness of the necessity of a fundamental revolution, the communist consciousness… Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass scale is, necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution…”
Compare this to Epperson’s description of Pewewardy’s TIPM as a method to “describe the various layers of Indigenous consciousness and how one can develop critical consciousness and promote action for social transformation.” In this formulation, “class consciousness” is replaced with “indigenous consciousness” and “revolution” with “social transformation,” but the Marxist roots are undeniable.
And just as Marx observed that converts to the communist cause could be recruited from the bourgeoisie by getting them to “[contemplate] the situation of” the proletariat, modern race-based Marxism dwells on or exaggerates past wrongs, amplifies or invents present injustices, and elevates victimhood as a means of guilting people into joining the revolution.
Ironically, cultural Marxists’ amoral pursuit of power by any means relies on the exploitation of traditional Western values of objective truth and recognition of right and wrong to manipulate people into joining their nihilistic revolution to subvert those very values: Racism is morally wrong, isn’t it? You don’t want to be a white supremacist, do you? Then join us in dismantling the racist systems of oppression in our society. What are they? Individuality, hard work, capitalism, family, religion, and constitutional government!
Notably, Pewewardy was a presenter — alongside Kim Popham, MFPE’s director of policy and research — at a session on “indigenous language and culture” at MFPE’s annual professional development conference for teachers. According to MFPE’s description of the event, its purpose was to use the TIPM model to “help faculty think more consciously about the meaning of colonization and decolonization in higher education” so they could use “tangible strategies” to “combat this pervasive social problem.”
Whatever you think about the ideology, most Montana public employees probably don’t pay union dues for the purpose of supporting book tours by Marxist academics.
MFPE contributed $12,600 to the Western Organization of Resource Councils (WORC).
WORC is a progressive nonprofit group which functions as a supporting and coordinating hub for a network of other far-left Mountain States advocacy groups. For instance, WORC’s most recent tax return shows it contributed $10,000 to Planned Parenthood of Montana and $30,000 to the Montana Human Rights Network, which advocates for causes like “abortion care” and “LGBT2S+ equality.”
Further, a “Black Lives Matter” statement posted to WORC’s website condemns the U.S. for the “horrendous pattern of police and societal brutality” it claims is evidence of the country’s “normalized, institutional, and systemic racism against Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC).”
In WORC’s estimation, “Racism and systemic oppression against BIPOC communities have been embedded in the cultural and political fabric of the United States from the beginning,” and “deep institutional racism grounded in white supremacy still exists.”
Apparently, such racism is so deeply embedded in American society that even though WORC “strive[s] to approach… [its] work through a lens of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusivity,” even it admits that “racism exists within our organization.”
Why would MFPE support an admittedly racist organization?
MFPE contributed $50,000 to “A Better Big Sky,” a progressive nonprofit organization based in Missoula.
According to A Better Big Sky’s 2022 tax return, the group gave:
- $600,000 to Montanans for Liberty and Justice, a political committee that works to elect progressive justices to the Montana Supreme Court;
- $400,000 to Big Sky Voters PAC, which opposed Republican Ryan Zinke’s candidacy for Congress;
- $88,000 to the Western Organization of Resource Councils;
- $83,000 to Montana Conservation Voters;
- $62,000 to Planned Parenthood; and
- $51,000 to the Montana AFL-CIO.
In 2023, A Bigger Big Sky supported a similar array of progressive advocacy groups, such as the Montana Human Rights Network ($20,000) — which works to “advance LGBTQ2S+ equality” and to “counteract racism, antisemitism, Indigenous sovereignty, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, and anti-government extremism across Montana” — and Middle Fork Strategies ($125,000), an “advocacy organization” that works to “empower progressive voices.”
MFPE reportedly spent another $82,310 on unidentified “external political issue advocacy.”
Given the nature of MFPE’s other giving, it’s safe to say those 2023-24 expenditures probably weren’t spent to advance truth, justice, and the American way.
It’s time for Montana policymakers to put an end to government support for Marxist unions like MFPE.
As a private organization, MFPE is thankfully afforded the freedom under U.S. and Montana laws to rail against capitalism, the constitution, law enforcement and foundational American principles. It is free to contribute to organizations and political candidates that share these views, however out-of-step they may be with most Montanans.
What is not acceptable is that so many taxpayer-funded government resources, systems, and personnel in Montana are used to subsidize, directly and indirectly, MFPE’s controversial views.
Until state policymakers put an end to practices like government collection of union dues and PAC contributions and providing paid leave to public employees to engage in union activism, the influence of Marxist organizations like MFPE will continue to be amplified at taxpayers’ expense.
In the short term, legislation under consideration by state legislators in Helena would be a good start in reigning in government support for unions like MFPE.
Introduced by Rep. Jodee Etchart (R-Billings), HB 557 would: (1) prevent public school teachers from using district-paid pupil-instruction-related (PIR) days to attend union events unrelated to teaching; and (2) eliminate the state requirement that schools close for the MFPE’s woke, partisan Educators Conference each October, though individual districts could continue to do so if they choose. HB 557 has already passed the House of Representatives along a nearly party-line vote and, hopefully, the Senate will soon send it to Gov. Gianforte’s desk.
