A movement to ban public sector bargaining nationally, Wisconsin and Ohio are recent examples, is gaining more attention. The promoters, including the Mackinac Center, justify this by submitting that joining a union is not a right but a privilege, like driving a car.

The United Nations was founded in the final days of World War II to avoid preventable wars and to “reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights.” In its early days, it formed The Commission on Human Rights, chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt. The Commission’s first act was to enact  The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which was adopted by the General Assembly in Paris on December 10, 1948, and has since established a standard under which all governments are judged.

Among the rights established by the UDHR is the right not to be enslaved or tortured. It also includes, in Article 23 (4): “… the right to form and to join trade unions …”

When adopted by the General Assembly, there were no dissenting votes, although the six communist countries, then members of the UN, as well as Saudi Arabia and South Africa, abstained. Security Council resolutions adopted afterward routinely refer to violations of the UDHR. Burma, Argentina, China and the former Yugoslavia have all defended themselves against allegations that they violated human rights by claiming to uphold the UDHR.

Republicans regularly point to the UDHR when criticizing other, usually communist governments. The Heritage Foundation used the 63rd anniversary of the UDHR in 2011 to argue that although “noble in its original intentions” it was under threat by Muslims and abortionists. Then-Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich’s well-known 2011 comment that Palestinian people were an “invented” people was made at a conference marking that anniversary of the UDHR.

The message here is that the UDHR must be respected. At least when it dovetails with conservative policy. When it doesn’t, it is to be ignored.

The UDHR establishes collective bargaining as a human right. You can’t responsibly use it as a weapon while pretending it doesn’t say what it says. Either the UDHR lists rights governments must respect or it doesn’t.

The Mackinac Center has pushed for years to shut down the state pension system, including writing about it for ALEC. It’s a big job so in recent years they’ve focused on (who else?) public school employees.

Ramping up for this attack, the Center has published 133 pension articles so far this year, most focusing on the system’s underfunding and always recommending only one solution: privatization. Little attention is paid to the cause of this underfunding (the 2007 stock market crash and its very slow recovery). Only “the sky is falling” prose followed by the usual business-enriching recommendations.

A Republican bill package (SB 172-8) would do this by converting your pension to a 401k-style retirement plan. That means the only thing that is certain about your retirement is that some unknown amount of money would be invested every pay period. What’s left when you retire depends entirely what happens in the stock market.

Writing about this last month, Mackinac Center staffer Anne Schieber said:

In a defined-contribution plan, government would be forced to place those retirement payments immediately into an account that was owned by the employee. Employees and taxpayers would no longer have to cross their fingers that retirement funds will be there in the future.

Never one to let the truth get in the way, Schieber fails to state the obvious: pensions are much more dependable to retirees than 401k plans. If you want to worry about whether you can retire on a specific date, invest your entire retirement in the stock market.

The most likely form these bills will take is to force only new employees into defined contribution plans. That would clearly be only a first step, the Mackinac Center would follow through on closing the pension system whenever it can summon the votes.

But this first step serves their ultimate goal: when fewer employees pay into the system the underfunding grows every year, followed by the inevitable cries to close the entire system.

The bills were scheduled for a hearing on Thursday, September 18th, but the meetings were cancelled at the last minute.

Update:

Converting the state pension system into a defined contribution system is not a new idea. Shifting all the risk to employees has been the objective since Governor Snyder took office in 2011. Within months, he had begun work, starting with new hires in local government, as well as state employees. In 2012 he moved on to school employees.

But there was a problem, a big problem. Thanks to years of underfunding, the 2007 economic crises and the slow recovery, the MPSERS unfunded liability had grown, and would grow even faster if new employees weren’t paying into it.

Again, this is a good thing if you’re trying to privatize the whole thing: As Noam Chomsky said:

That’s the standard technique of privatization: defund, make sure thing don’t work, people get angry, and hand it over to private capital.”

So the legislature hired an outside consulting firm, The Segal Group, to:

… evaluate the existing Hybrid plan and the impact of implementing a defined contribution plan for all new hires.

The results were not pretty. Segal found:

The administration has to move quickly. As the economy recovers and the stock market with it, the MPSERS unfunded liability crisis will begin to subside, and with it, the sky-is-falling need to convert.

I cannot just simply dig my head in the sand and hope for people, who have never worked in a classroom, make all the right decisions that impact the crucial education of students. Politics is a part of education, and I choose for my profession to be part of that debate.

In a far-ranging post, Michigander’s premier progressive website, Eclectablog, sums up the Mackinac Center’s summer obsession: convincing members to quit. Today’ post reviews the long history of fee-paying at the MEA, sums up the massive media campaign and the Mackinac Center’s motivations: to defund the MEA in order to take out the only sizable political opponent standing in the way of its efforts to monetize the public schools.

The piece ends with this:

My prediction is that, despite spending this enormous amount of money and other resources, the Mackinac Center and their corporatist partners will once again find that teachers overwhelmingly support their unions and will continue to do so. I feel pretty confident that, like last year when fewer than 1% of the MEA members left in August, teachers will make the choice that is in their own self-interest.

Here, here.

Push Polling. The lowest form of political dirty tricks has come to the Opt Out campaign. The American Association of Public Opinion Research defines push polling as:

… an insidious form of negative campaigning, disguised as a political poll. “Push polls” are not surveys at all, but rather unethical political telemarketing — telephone calls disguised as research that aim to persuade large numbers of voters and affect election outcomes, rather than measure opinions.

Now MEA members are being mislead by phone calls with blocked caller ID. They are asked:

• Are you an MEA member?
• Do you support the union?
• How would your support change if you knew it supported pro-choice candidates?
• How would your support change if you knew it supported taking away gun rights?
• How would your support change if you knew it supported tax increases over spending reform?
• How would your support change if you knew the average member paid around $1,000 in dues?
• Do you know you can only opt out in August?
• Do you want more information on how to opt out?

Every one of the “would your support change” questions are premised on a lie.

• The MEA funds no candidates. Such support is illegal.
• It’s a manufactured myth that the MEA has ever taken a position on either gun control or abortion, it hasn’t.
• It recommends candidates on both sides of these questions, so long as they support public education.
• The MEA supports restoring funding cuts to classrooms, including from spending reforms.
• MEA dues are capped hundreds of dollars below the $1,000 level.

When asked, the “pollster” will say s/he is working for company called CSI Research. This is almost certainly a lie. In 2012, a push poll in Alabama used the same answer in a race between two Republicans vying for, of all things, the Public Service Commission, “CSI Research” pushed callers away from supporting one of the Republicans. Those calls came from cell phones in Washington DC.

Who’s behind this? Whoever it is, they are careful to use an out-of-state company, that in turn uses a phoney name to insulate themselves from an identifiable client.

In 2008,  a group called Common Sense Issues funded a push poll that told South Carolina voters John McCain “supports experiments on unborn children.” It seems unlikely this is the same group, but given the opaque regulations protecting corporate spending, we’ll never know.

The Mackinac Center’s top summer priority is to convince MEA members to quit their union. And time is running out so the Center is blazing with all its guns. The long list of the strategies the Center has employed makes this plain. At last count, it has used:

-Targeted Google ads
-Targeted Facebook ads
-Opt Out Facebook page
-Opt Out website
-Mass post card mailings
-Mass emails to school email accounts
-Devoted the Mackinac Center website homepage to Opt Out
-Earned media
-Op Eds by staffers in newspapers across the state
-Newspapers Op Eds written by surrogates
-Push poll/robo calls
-Mackinac Center Twitter feeds
-Mackinac Center staffer Twitter feeds
-AFP FaceBook posts
-AFP Free Press ad mentioning both the Mackinac Center and the Opt Out site

When asked, Mackinac Center staffers say this is all about “worker freedom.” But this drop-everything-else approach suggests a real desperation. “This is our big chance, let’s not blow it,” they seem to be saying.

If this corporate funded ‘think tank’ were really just interested in school employees knowing their options, would it really mount a campaign of this magnitude?

Need more evidence that the Center is using MEA members in an attempt to defund their own union? This email shows that while helping the House Education Committee chair write the 80/20 bill (that the Governor later signed and which now forces you to pay much more of your healthcare costs), Mackinac Center staffers admitted why they were going to all this trouble:

Breaking the MEA so it can’t keep fighting every corporate advantage that the Center intends to move this next legislative session is job 1. The Mackinac Center is banking on MEA members not seeing beyond their wallets, helping them to break their union and clearing the way for “outlawing government collective bargaining.” That would give them a clear field for a corporate takeover of our public schools.

On the day MEAMatters launched, Mackinac staffer Jarrett Skorup helped promote the site by tweeting a link. He also included what he thought was the most significant sentence on the site, and in the process, confirmed the Mackinac Center’s motive in pushing our members to quit:

This is about political strength; its not about you.

If there ever was a doubt what the Mackinac Center and the Koch Brothers think of you and the work you do, that doubt has passed. Ex-MEA member Rob Wiersema argues in an August 17th Lansing State Journal Op Ed that you should lose your salary schedule:

The step scale system also distorts the true market value of teachers. Most of us, including myself (sic) are paid above market value…Because wages are high, districts must restrict the number of teachers hired.

Wiersema is not some lone advocate. He has long served as a mouthpiece for the Mackinac Center and is spending his summer speaking on their behalf to defund the MEA

.

On August 1st he authored an anti-MEA email sent by the Mackinac Center to school email addresses. On August 12th, he appeared on a Heritage Foundation (the national equivalent and model for the Mackinac Center) video cast, and on the same day was featured on the AAU faux union‘s website. He’s made these and other, some pretty curious, arguments for the Mackinac Center.

The salary schedule is as basic a feature as any part of a union contract and The Mackinac Center has worked to ban them for years. The Center says you can save money by freeloading, but it wants to outlaw the one contract feature that assures you of progressive pay throughout your career.

The Koch Brother front group Americans for Prosperity recently added a “Take a vacay from the MEA” post to its FaceBook page. Members were not pleased.

Repeating the Mackinac Center’s postcard insult that school employees spend the summer at the beach, the suggestion that being a freeloader is like being on vacation was too much.

A sample of the long, ever-growing list of comments:

Lori Stone My union protected me from being targeted by my administration the same year I was chosen teacher of the year by my colleagues. I wouldn’t trade MEA for a 50% raise.

Mark Sleep Why do you care AFP? Whose prosperity are you for? Unions help the middle class bargain for prosperity. Why should non payers free load off paying members? This is nothing but a scam to weaken workers voices in the political arena.

Carl Amos Americans for Prosperity is an organization created by the Koch brothers. Its goal is to missinform Americans and destroy thecworking class.

Take a look before it gets deleted (a comment here and there can be a little course).

Retired MEA member Jose Engel saw a recent ad paid for by the Koch Brother’s front group Americans for Prosperity, which included a fill-in-the-blank resignation letter.

Not one to sit back, Jose wrote a few choice words across the page and sent it in. She wrote:

I joined the MEA in 1953 and am still a (ret) member! Thanks for many years of terrific support. Keep up the great work!

Jose Engel
Farmington Hills
(Nice of these people to to provide me with paper and address. I don’t think they planned on this.)

Got one of these to share? Scan it or photograph it, and send it to MEAMatters@gmail.com.

MEA Secretary-Treasurer Rick Trainor sets the record straight on who the Mackinac Center is  really fighting for and how much their lobbying has cost school employees. He lists the state laws written by the Mackinac Center – the 80/20 healthcare premium law, the 3% retirement paycheck deduction, the reduced retirement multiplier and the elimination of retirement healthcare for new school employees – and says:

“After taking tens of thousands of dollars away from you, they propose to tell you its your union dues that are the problem.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DL8iwvTpA-Y