The Freedom Foundation’s unrelenting outreach efforts in New Jersey over the past few months continue to produce in record numbers of opt-outs with no end in sight.
Last month alone, 185 public employees from various unions opted out of union membership and dues, the most we’ve ever seen opt out from New Jersey in a single month.
Leading the stampede were members of AFSCME Council 63, who accounted for nearly 40 percent of the Garden State’s April opt outs.
We had gone out of our way to make sure that AFSCME members in New Jersey knew their union dues were enabling AFSCME International to commit various crimes against its own members, (including lying about spending union dues on politics and forging signatures on membership agreements), and they were quite responsive to the variety of mail pieces, emails and phone calls they had received from the Freedom Foundation over the past two months.
In addition to the “AFSCME Lies” campaign, members of AFSCME 63 and thousands more public employees from different unions from around the state received a special Tax Day-themed mail piece on April 15 that explained how much they could save over the course of one year if they stopped paying union dues.
The response was massive, as members of Communications Workers of America New Jersey (CWA NJ), the New Jersey Education Association (NJEA), the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 30, the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE) Local 195 and Service Employees International Union (SEIU) 32BJ opted out in droves.
The AFSCME Lies campaign and the Tax Day flyer proved yet again that when we reach out to public employees and tell them the other side of the opt out story, they’re more than willing to leave their unions.
But that’s not all. We’ve also been busy conducting even more outreach to New Jersey and have no doubt last month’s record totals are just the tip of the iceberg. Public employees in New Jersey have a lot to say about why they’re leaving in record numbers and, unlike their union, the Freedom Foundation is actually listening.
