Posts tagged AFT
Northside ISD school board incumbents face wall of union-backed challengers
April 22, 2025 // Four Northside Independent School District incumbent school board members are up for reelection this year, all of whom face opposition from the district’s teacher union, which backed challengers in their races. Union leaders are looking to shake up a board of incumbents who are primarily retired from their professional careers and promote a new class of younger community activists.
Unions are failing to protect the privacy of members from hackers and DOGE
April 11, 2025 // Last year, Service Employees International Union Local 1000, which serves 100,000 California state employees, also fell victim to ransomware. And in a similar lack of transparency, the California union masked what happened behind vagaries and euphemisms, calling the crime “a network disruption by an outside actor.” This dereliction of duty comes at a great cost. Following another data breach, UNITE HERE, a New York-based labor union that exposed 800,000 people to a data breach, paid $6 million in out-of-court settlement. In 2023, a Boston union lost $6.4 million of member health funds to hackers. Most corporations have sensitive personal information. And that comes with a duty to protect it
Anti-Israel radical socialists who’ve backed Luigi Mangione plotting to take over United Federation of Teachers
April 9, 2025 // Radical socialists who back anti-Israel groups and alleged CEO killer Luigi Mangione are steadily making inroads into one of the city’s most powerful labor unions, sources warn The Post. Candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America are polling strongly in elections to lead the United Federation of Teachers — who represent nearly 200,000 educators and manage a welfare fund with $1 billion in assets — which take place next month, according to a source. The progressive political movement, which backed Vermont governor Bernie Sanders during his presidential campaign in 2016 and was behind New York Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’s insurgent victory two years later, set up a strategy to infiltrate labor unions in 2018, according to a report in Politico, citing an internal DSA memo.
Pay for Play: Al Sharpton Books Labor Bosses Who Pour Millions Into His Nonprofit on MSNBC Show
March 30, 2025 // In the past year alone, Sharpton, who hosts PoliticsNation on the weekends, has interviewed the presidents of five unions that have given his nonprofit a total of $6.3 million: American Federation of Teachers, National Education Association (NEA), Service Employees International Union (SEIU), American Federation of Government Employees, and American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). In all, labor unions have given nearly $8 million earmarked as "gifts," "grants," or payments for "political activities" to the National Action Network, which in some years has paid Sharpton a $1 million salary and paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for private jets and limo services.
Teacher unions sue Trump over $400 million Columbia University research cuts
March 26, 2025 // The AFT has also sued Trump over his efforts to dismantle the Department of Education. Trump and AFT President Randi Weingarten have long clashed over the rule of unions in the education system, dating back to Trump's first presidency, when the two fought over return-to-class plans during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Teachers sue Trump admin for stopping affordable student loan repayment plans
March 24, 2025 // The teachers' union, however, says the Education Department's decision to interpret the 8th Circuit's decision on Feb. 18 "in such a maximalist way" has "wreaked havoc" on the system. The union claims in its filing that paper applications are not currently being processed as well.
US teachers union sues education agency for shutting student loan repayment plans
March 20, 2025 // AFT “brings this lawsuit to compel the Department to abide by Congress’s command and provide borrowers with the ability to re-pay their loans through the affordable, income-driven repayment plans to which they are entitled,” says the complaint. The education department has cited a court ruling over an income driven repayment plan introduced under Joe Biden, the Saving on a Valuable Education (Save) plan, in their decision to stop all IDR applications and processing.
Dual enrollment students’ classes could be disrupted by looming community college strike in Philly
March 19, 2025 // Over the weekend, 97% of the community college’s staff and faculty union members voted to authorize a strike, should their union and the college’s administration fail to reach a contract agreement. The union is demanding pay raises that keep pace with inflation and class size reductions, the return of a child care center on campus, and subsidized transit passes for staff and students. The vote means union members agreed to allow their leadership to call a strike at any time, but the faculty are not on strike.
Act 10, Scourge of Wisconsin Teachers, Faces Uncertain Future in Court
March 4, 2025 // According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the proportion of union members in Wisconsin’s workforce fell by nearly half, from 14.2% to 7.4%, between 2010 and 2023 (since that figure includes workers from all sectors, the drop for government employees is likely much steeper). A report from the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, a right-leaning think tank, showed that the total number of unions holding annual recertification votes across the state declined from 540 in 2014 to 369 in 2018. The largest teachers’ union in the state, the Wisconsin Education Association Council, experienced a dizzying loss of manpower and organizing heft. A 2019 study conducted by a pair of researchers at the University of Wisconsin found that WEAC was forced to restructure and cut its staffing by about two-thirds. The retrenchment was made necessary by a freefall in the collection of dues, the payment of which was made voluntary by Act 10. The loss of paid organizers could be offset, in part, by the efforts of teacher volunteers. But the union had no ready replacement for the millions of dollars in government relations funds that had suddenly evaporated; WEAC went from being one of the biggest lobbying forces in Madison to a second-tier player virtually overnight.
Ending the free ride: How school tax dollars subsidize union activity and politics in Missouri
February 26, 2025 // In 2018 and 2020, the NEA and MNEA together spent more than $3.2 million bankrolling high-profile Missouri ballot campaigns over legislative redistricting and government ethics. A component of their effort — which remains on the books to this day — was an amendment to the state constitution that strictly prohibits Missouri state lawmakers and candidates from engaging in political fundraising on state property. Despite seeking to enforce this principle on others, however, teachers unions like the MNEA are one of the few — if not the only — special interest groups that regularly abuse it by routinely taking advantage of taxpayer-funded school resources to support their own political agenda.