Larry Sand on Employee Freedom Week and Ben Johnson

Larry Sand, President of California Teacher Empowerment Network, provides his views on National Employee Freedom Week on California Policy Center, and distills Ben Johnson’s shattering revelations on the inside workings of teacher unions.

We are in the middle of the fifth annual National Employee Freedom Week, a nation-wide effort to inform employees about their union membership options. In 22 non-right-to-work (NRTW) states, an employee can become a full-fledged member, an agency fee payer (avoids paying for the union’s political agenda, but still must pay for basic union activities) or a religious objector (pays nothing to the union, but must donate a full dues equivalent to a charity). In the other 28 states, which are right-to-work (RTW), workers are free to join or can completely opt out of any association with a union.

On Sunday, the results of a survey conducted by Carnegie Mellon University researcher Lloyd Corder, which compares union members’ opinions of their unions’ performance, management and practices in NRTW states against those in RTW states, were released. The findings are most interesting.