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Prior to the 1960s, public sector unions were generally illegal. They should be illegal still: their creation wrought a major change in the political balance of power, in favor of the state.

The worst of the public sector unions are the teachers’ unions. In many states, teachers were legally required to join, or at least to support financially, their state’s teachers’ union in order to maintain a teacher’s license. This incredibly corrupt arrangement persisted for decades.

It changed in 2018 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in Janus v. AFSCME, that public employees cannot constitutionally be forced to join or contribute financial support to a union. Janus restored the freedom of teachers and other public sector employees, and opened the door to reform.

Beginning in 2019, my organization has conducted annual campaigns to inform teachers of their rights, encourage them to drop out of our state’s union, Education Minnesota, and provide them with the means to do so. In the beginning, it was a David vs. Goliath conflict. Education Minnesota, a financial behemoth and propaganda juggernaut, had long been the 600-pound gorilla of Minnesota politics. But over time, more and more teachers have chosen to leave the union behind.

My colleague Catrin Wigfall created this chart, taken from the union’s own reporting, showing Education Minnesota’s membership over the last 11 years:

The union’s revenue has fallen along with its membership. Why are teachers leaving the union? Links omitted:

Educators have been saying “no thanks” to union membership over the years for a variety of reasons — there are those who are exhausted by the union’s political leanings, political activism, and apparent intent to take on everything except its primary mission of supporting teachers in their day-to-day professions.

In fact, Education Minnesota dedicates only a quarter (25.5 percent) of its spending to representational activities.

And here I thought representing its members was the principal, if not sole, purpose of a union! In fact, the teachers’ unions are mostly slush funds for the Democratic Party.

Campaigns similar to ours have been conducted in a number of other states, and the national union to which Education Minnesota forwards dues, the National Education Association, is also in decline:

The National Education Association (NEA), the national teacher union affiliate to whom Minnesota educator union members pay dues, is also down members. According to its most recent federal LM-2 filing, reported on by the Illinois Policy Institute, the union lost 17,895 members in the 2024 fiscal year alone. Just nine percent of NEA’s spending was on teacher representation, “which should be its core focus. Its spending on politics and other contributions is more than four times higher than its spending on representation,” continues the Illinois Policy Institute.

The NEA is the largest union in the U.S., and it does virtually nothing for its members. On the other hand, it does a great deal for the Democratic Party.

We probably won’t be able to ban public sector unions any time soon, but by exposing their corrupt operations we can continue to shrink their membership, and thus their political clout. If you would like to help my organization do this, you can donate here.