Some may remember the “Wisconsin Union War” about 10 years ago after Gov. Scott Walker and the Republican-controlled state legislature passed Act One, which made union membership optimal rather than mandatory, by stopping the automatic deduction of union dues. Despite the fact that public unions originated in Wisconsin and that teachers unions are the most resilient of all, union membership dropped like a rock as soon as teachers had the right to choose whether to belong or not. It literally took a war, with “peaceful protesters” occuping the capital building (and crapping in the hallways) for weeks, but in the end even teachers did not fall into lockstep with the union once they had the choice. WEAC, the WI teachers union, was forced to sell the fancy headquarters building it had built as a monument to itself. This article and others from that time might be of interest:
Unfortunately this was not the case in California -
The membership of California’s largest teachers’ union, and by far the largest state-level teachers’ union in the nation, has declined by about 15,000.
That’s according to figures on the California Teachers Association’s website, which until August listed its membership as 325,000. The number is now 310,000.
There has been considerable speculation that the membership of the CTA would decline in the wake of the Janus ruling, because there would be less reason for public employees to belong to a union if they could still benefit from union bargaining without paying any fees. Backers of the Janus lawsuit certainly hoped that would be the case and reached out to teachers to convince them to leave the union.
But nationally teachers unions and other public employee unions have stepped up their recruitment efforts and the losses of membership have not been as severe as some had predicted.
I wish Texas teachers were as enlightened and informed as those Wisconsin teachers you describe. The TEA may be the biggest driver in advocating socialism in Texas. I have no sauce, it’s just life experience. *spit*