(OLYMPIA, Wash.) — Today, the Freedom Foundation officially expands its battle against government unions into all 50 states.
For decades, government unions have been freely extracting billions of dollars from their members and spending a significant portion of that money to elect liberal politicians, while lining their own pockets. Since 2014, the Freedom Foundation has been laser-focused on holding these unions accountable by educating public employees on the West Coast of their rights to opt-out of their unions and stop paying dues. Now, that campaign is moving across the United States.
“We want every public employee in the country to know they can stop funding a political agenda they don’t support,” said Freedom Foundation CEO Aaron Withe. “In the past three years alone, we’ve helped nearly 100,000 public employees stop paying union dues, primarily on the West Coast. In that time, our work has denied union bosses more than $140 million they otherwise would have spent on their lavish lifestyles and Left-wing politics. We’re about to cost them a whole lot more.”
The national expansion involves a robust outreach campaign consisting of in-person canvassing, postal mail and email appeals, webinars, social media and traditional advertising to inform all public employees about the 2018 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Janus v. AFSCME, which affirmed their right not to fund a government union as a condition of employment.
Just as importantly, the Freedom Foundation employs a large, in-house legal team dedicated to fighting these unions in court when they break laws and don’t let their members leave.
The Freedom Foundation is currently litigating more than 70 labor-related lawsuits, with more to come.
Government employee unions have garnered untold political power by supporting radical politics with billions of taxpayer dollars that they’re now using to impose devastating school shutdowns, inject toxic Critical Race Theory into our classrooms, military and all levels of government, and orchestrate the demonization and defunding of law enforcement.
Our experience has taught us that when public employees find out they can stop funding this political activity and keep their dues money in their own pockets, they opt out in droves.
And government union bosses know it. That’s why they’re fighting back with a variety of strategies, including publicly humiliating and bullying their own members into submission, imposing arbitrary “opt-out windows” that significantly limit the opportunity to drop membership and, when all else fails, forging workers’ signatures on bogus membership agreements.
Thankfully, the Freedom Foundation is fighting back to defend the rights of all public employees, anywhere in the country, to be free from union coercion.
The Freedom Foundation has developed a model of success that’s been battle-tested in the heavily unionized states on the West Coast and proven equally successful when later applied in Pennsylvania and Ohio.
“For far too long, government employee unions have been using taxpayer dollars to grow government and their own political power,” Withe concluded. “The Freedom Foundation is here to fight back.”
