The Freedom Foundation Assault On Unions

The Freedom Foundation wants you, public school teachers, to come to their  second annual Teacher Freedom Summit this summer. July 8-10 in Downtown Denver. 400 teachers for 3 days. Training, hotel, F&B included. And it's free! You just have to apply!

Who are these folks, and what do they want? The blurb on their website is pretty clear:

The Freedom Foundation is more than a think tank. We’re more than an action tank. We’re a battle tank that’s battering the entrenched power of left-wing government union bosses who represent a permanent lobby for bigger government, higher taxes, and radical social agendas.

Their language when approaching teachers and other members of public sector unions is a lot about liberating public employees from political exploitation. Their language in spaces like fundraising letters is a bit more blunt:

The Freedom Foundation has a proven plan for bankrupting and defeating government unions through education, litigation, legislation and community activation ... we won’t be satisfied with anything short of total victory against the government union thugs.

Destroy unions and defund the political left. And they work hard at it, too. They have put an army of foot soldiers out there going door to door in hopes of turning an entire state blue. In one example, they sent activists dressed as Santa Claus to stand outside government buildings, where they told workers they could give themselves a holiday gift by exercising their right not to pay that portion of union dues that goes to political activity.

The foundation was launched in 1991 as the Evergreen Freedom Foundation by Lynn Harsh and Bob Williams. These days Harsh is VP of Strategy for the State Policy Network, the national network of right wing thinky tanks and advocacy groups founded in 1992 (it appears that the foundation may have helped with that launch). Her bio says she started out as a teacher and went on to found two private schools. Williams was a Washington state politician and failed gubernatorial candidate. He went on to work with SPN and ALEC, the conservative corporate legislation mill before passing away in 2022. SPN  started giving out an award in his name in 2017. 

The foundation is not small potatoes operation-- the staff itself is huge, and the foundation operates out of offices in five states (Washington, Oregon, California, Ohio, and Pennsylvania). 

Longtime CEO Tom McCabe is now the Chairman of the Board, and he has been pretty clear in his aims. “Labor bosses are the single greatest threat to freedom and opportunity in America today,” he wrote in one fundraising letter.  The current CEO is Aaron Withe, the guy who headed up the door-to-door campaign the get Oregon union members to quit their unions.

The foundation gets money from a variety of the usual suspects, including the Koch family foundations, Sarah Scaife Foundation, Donors Trust, Ed Uihlein Family Foundation, the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation, and the State Policy Network. The have gotten small mountains of money from the Bradley Foundation, which also heavily funds the anti-union Center for Union Facts. 

Many of these same folks helped fund the Janus lawsuit that did away with Fair Share, and the Freedom Foundation was one of the groups that immediately started to work to get teachers to leave their unions. Only, of course, because of their deep and altruistic concern for those teachers' freedoms, and not because they were hoping to defund and defang unions as a source of support for Democrats. Their website boasts of how many members and how much money they have taken from the unions.

This is an outfit that can afford to put up 400 teachers in downtown Denver, plus "an amazing lineup of speakers and panels" that will cover topics such as "JANUS rights, running an opt-out campaign, standing up to union bullying, decertifying your school district, and so much more." 

We are equipping public school teachers with the tools they need to counter the tactics used by the NEA and AFT to bring the socialist dogma of their leadership into our children’s classrooms.

What could be more inspirational than a bunch of rich people spending a whole lot of money to convince not-so-rich workers to give up their union support and protection so that the rich people don't have to face political opposition. Lord knows I've had plenty of beefs with the union over the years, but this convoluted plan to keep workers from contributing to the Democratic party is not the way to go. You could always, I don't know, convince workers that your policies and candidates are worth supporting. 

These plans always remind me of that scene in every vampire movie, where some poor guy is holding off the vampire with a crucifix, and the vampire soothingly tells him, "Just put that down. You'll be perfectly safe without it, I promise." Listening to the bloodsucker is always a bad idea.