From Mike Antonucci:
Faced with unfriendly legislatures and governors seeking to roll back the union’s influence, the NEA Executive Committee decided to double down – literally. It proposed raising each active member’s assessment to $20, effective in September 2011. The union’s board of directors ratified the decision, and it will go before the NEA Representative Assembly for a vote this July in Chicago. If passed, NEA’s national dues for teachers will total $178.
The increase in the assessment has a five-year sunset clause, but this is just eyewash, since the last time the contribution was doubled – from $5 to $10 in 2004 – it also had a five-year sunset clause. The 2007 NEA Representative Assembly made the $10 contribution permanent.
NEA is already the top political campaign spender in the nation. This increase will give the national union an additional $40 million per election cycle. The increase alone is larger than all but two other groups spent during the entire 2007-08 cycle.
There are many Republicans and Conservatives in the NEA, the vast majority of them because they are required by law to be in the NEA in order to keep their jobs. And the NEA is deciding to double individual members’ Democrat Party campaign contributions because the NEA doesn’t take in enough for the Democrat Party slush fund.
It should be illegal to force someone to join a union just to qualify for a job.
John wrote, “There are many Republicans and Conservatives in the NEA, the vast majority of them because they are required by law to be in the NEA in order to keep their jobs.”
Teachers forced to pay dues to an organization at odds with their political principles are suffering an especially pernicious form of taxation without representation. It operates in a similar way to how gangs or the mob runs a protection racket. Pay up or get hurt, it this case if you don’t kick-back to the union thugs and their Democrat Party enablers you can’t get a job. And, this racket is legal, sort of.
That raises equal protection issues, but so long as the Department of InJustice is under the heel of criminals in cahoots with union thugs, teachers will never get an honest hearing under the corrupt Obama degeneracy.