You Can't Handle the Truth

Some things you should know about the Ohio Educators’ Association (OEA) and National Educators’ Association (NEA). These are pleasant names for the teachers’ unions.

By Ohio law, teachers must pay union dues to get employment. Dues are not cheap, approaching $1,000 per teacher each year. Most teachers don’t know that their dues pay for three levels of unions: local, state and national. How is that money used? At the national level, it’s distributed to a variety of liberal causes. Whether its members would ever support or approve of those causes is completely irrelevant.

Moreover, if you were a teacher in Ohio and your husband or wife were running for a political office, and the unions were opposed to your spouse’s politics, they would be using your dues for attack ads against your spouse. Would you have any say in this insanity? No.

The public sector unions are no different today than any other overweight bureaucracy. First and foremost, they seek to perpetuate themselves and thus will do anything to hold on to their power and grow it. The leaders are not there for the rank and file-they are there for themselves. They are corrupt, and they are determined to amass the money that power depends on. Here is a recent illustration of how the Ohio Educators' Association union has done exactly that:

This is part of an article from the June OEA magazine--

“By an overwhelming majority, the OEA Representative Assembly voted to approve a one-time $54 dues assessment for active regular members and a one-time $25 dues assessment for education support professional members for the funding of the effort to pass the referendum petition and support of the We Are Ohio campaign. While exempting student and retired members, the assessment will raise approximately $5 million for the SB 5 repeal referendum campaign. The Ohio Education Association represents 128,000 teachers, faculty members and support professionals in Ohio's public schools, colleges and universities.”

$5 million dollars.

Here is the link to read the complete article:

http://www.swoea.org/news/news-detail.asp?id=712

Note that this tasty bit of information is ALLLL the way toward the end of the article, which itself appears toward the end of the magazine, which is mainly devoted to covering all of the “horrible” effects of SB 5 and thus the need to repeal it (This is just in case you were thinking that repealing SB 5 was low priority information.).

Were teachers asked at the local level if they would support this “assessment”? No. The unions will tell you that this is what the representatives are for.

Okay. Then were teachers sent a message from their local “representatives” about this assessment and what it was going to be used for? No. Would this have been hard to do? No. Should it have been done? Absolutely. Do most teachers even know about this? No. But they will find out in August.

Is there a reason why they were not told individually, but rather had to read all the way towards the end of the OEA magazine to discover it? What do you think?

If you were a teacher just making it from paycheck to paycheck or whose husband or wife had lost a job, or, the unthinkable, didn’t support repeal of SB 5, what would your reaction be? I can tell you that many teachers despise the unions and the dues, and have no confidence that the unions are out there working for their best interests.

So, why will the unions sell their own mothers to hold on to collective bargaining? Power and money.