When the Freedom Foundation helps public employees escape from their union, it’s always based on the principle that it’s their dues money and they, not the union leadership, should be the ones deciding how to spend it.
These days, there are lots of other uses to which that extra $80 or $100 a month can be put — small matters like food, fuel and medicine, for example.
But occasionally we hear about an experience that puts the whole question in the proper perspective.
The Freedom Foundation’s Ohio team recently attended cookout in Cincinnati organized and hosted by an area church. The idea was to celebrate and honor the hard work of educators, but the event also gave us a valuable opportunity to network and dis-tribute information detailing how the city’s teachers can opt out of the Ohio Education Association.
Entirely by coincidence, one of the evening’s other attendees was an educator who had participated in a Freedom Foundation-sponsored virtual information session to learn about her constitutional right to leave the Ohio Education Association.
She said our message resonated with her, but she was still on the fence about leaving the union until the following Sunday, when a missionary visited her church with a plea to help victims of human trafficking.
This educator was extremely moved by his presentation and wanted to do what she could to help. That’s when it clicked.
Rather than lining the pockets of union fat cats and funding their radically liberal political agenda, the money she would otherwise spend on union dues could be used to fund the noble and worthy mission to aid victims of human trafficking.
And because she had attended the virtual meeting hosted by the Freedom Foundation, she knew the exact steps to take to quit dues payments to the Ohio Education Association.
With conviction and excitement, she explained that the savings of dues payments are now being redirected to the ministry serving the oppressed victims of modern-day slavery.
Stories like this touch our hearts and validate our efforts more than anyone can know. It’s exactly why we do what we do.
But again, it shouldn’t take a choice as stark as union greed versus human need.
The wages a worker earns are his or hers alone, and they don’t have to justify keeping every penny of it their own pocket.
Pretty much whatever they spend it on qualifies as a better investment than what the unions would do with it.
