UNION ALTERNATIVE FOR WISCONSIN TEACHERS

Education labor group:  We have another way

http://watchdog.org/98348/alternative-to-teachers-unions-looking-to-make-push-in-wi/

Watch Dog – Ryan Ekvall and Kirsten Adshead – 7/29/2013

Lacroix left the classroom in June to take a job as membership director for the Wisconsin branch of the American Association of Educators, which provides liability insurance and professional resources for educators, without collective bargaining and without political lobbying.

“We’re not another union,” she said. “We’re an alternative to the union.”

Teachers aren’t the only public employees looking for new options in post Act 10 Wisconsin.

Two weeks ago, state corrections officers voted to disband from the Wisconsin State Employees Union for the greener pastures of the Wisconsin Association for Correctional Law Enforcement.

The WACLE now represents close to 5,900 state employees. WACLE cut dues in half from $36 a month under WSEU to about $18 a month.

WACLE interim president Brian Cunningham previously chastised WSEU-AFSME for spending too much money filling lawmaker’s campaign coffers and not enough representing its members. “In the post-Act 10 world, AFSCME has been nowhere to be seen,” Cunningham said.

READER COMMENT:  The website of NEA’s Iowa affiliate says, “The goal of AAE is to weaken the membership strength of NEA and its state and local affiliates, thus reducing the Association’s political power and making it easier to privatize public education.” And this is negative in what way? The NEA exists to serve the desires of its dues-paying membership, along with advocating for every left-wing political movement extant. The actual, productive education of children is NOT among its priorities, and, in fact, the NEA's activities have done significant damage to that mission, all the while demanding that the public from which it extracts its funding continue pouring more into the kitty, even while private sector employees, including those in CBU's, have lost their jobs or experienced substantial reductions in their wages and benefits, due to economic realities. Also, while jailers are definitely public safety employees, in that they have even more personal and expanded contact with arrestees than cops, dispatchers do not similarly qualify.

 

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