Feb. 15, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
36:50
3203 Unions Headed for Supreme Court Loss? | Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association
The Center for Individual Rights is representing Rebecca Friedrichs and nine other California teachers in a lawsuit against the California Teachers Association - arguing that forced union association and dues payments are illegal. The case has made it all the way to the United States Supreme Court.Lead plaintiff Rebecca Friedrichs has taught for twenty-six years and says, “the union has become what it used to fight - a powerful, entrenched organization more focused on self-preservation than educating children and protecting teachers.”The CTA has used millions of dollars in compulsory dues to become one of the most powerful political organizations in the state of California - promoting issues with which many teachers fundamentally disagree which highlights the compelled speech inherent in mandatory union membership of any kind.Stefan Molyneux speaks with plaintiff Rebecca Friedrichs and lawyer Terence J. Pell about the nature of the Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association case, the likelihood of victory, the consequences of forced association and what this means for government unions nationwide!Terence J. Pell is President of the Center for Individual Rights: https://www.cir-usa.orgRights for Teachers: https://twitter.com/Rights4TeachersNote: This interview was recorded prior to the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and many news outlets have speculated that this case would be "immediately affected" by his passing.
Hi everybody, this is Stephen Molyneux for Free Domain Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
So we've got a very powerful interview coming up.
I just wanted to give you a little bit of backstory to it.
The Center for Individual Rights is representing a woman named Rebecca Friedrichs, who we'll hear from shortly, and nine other California teachers in a lawsuit against the California Teachers Association.
They're arguing that forced union association and dues payments are actually illegal.
The case has made it all the way to the United States Supreme Court.
So the lead plaintiff, Rebecca, has taught for 26 years and says, quote, the union has become what it used to fight, a powerful, entrenched organization more focused on self-preservation than educating children and protecting teachers.
Now, the CTA, California Teachers Association, has used millions of dollars in compulsory dues to become one of the most powerful political organizations in the entire state of California.
It promotes issues with which many teachers fundamentally disagree, and this is a fact that highlights the compelled speech inherent in mandatory union membership of any kind.
The teachers may not agree with what the union is spending their forced union dues on, but they're compelled to support it anyway.
California law does allow teachers to opt out of the 30% or so of their dues devoted to overt political lobbying, but they may not opt out of the 60-70% of their dues the union determines is devoted to collective bargaining.
Requiring teachers to pay these agency fees assumes that collective bargaining is non-political, but bargaining with local governments is inherently political.
Now, the CTA spent over $211 million in political expenditures from 2000 through 2009.
The CTA has been relentless for pushing for higher salaries during a time of economic contraction in California.
Teacher members are forced to subsidize a push for higher teacher salaries during a time when many of the families of their students are experiencing unemployment.
That, of course, does not make it that much more credible to be a teacher in that situation.
The CTA takes the inherently political view that more of the scarce taxpayer resources should be devoted to education rather than to other needed government services such as parks or public safety.
The CTA also bargains for stronger tenure protection, a position which many teachers, especially younger teachers, disagree with.
That's the last in, first out way of keeping teachers during any times of layoffs.
The CTA has negotiated to make school choice programs such as vouchers more difficult to implement, a position which also many of the teachers disagree with.
Now, union supporters will often say that members can opt out of the union's political activities.
However, as we've just mentioned, the union's collective bargaining activities are themselves political in nature.
Their argument is that no teacher should be forced to support collective bargaining activities that further an explicitly political agenda of bigger government and higher taxes, as we talked about in the interview, 40% or so of the teachers are actually Republicans, which is theoretically at least for smaller government.
Now, on January 11th, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in this Friedrichs v.
CTA. The free speech principles being argued for apply to all public employee unions, not just teachers' unions.
This case could open up all public unions in all states to individual choice.
The decision is pending whether you want to be part of the union or not.
Now, we also talked to Terence J. Pell.
He's a lawyer involved with the case and president of the Center for Individual Rights.
Rebecca Friedrichs is the lead plaintiff in Friedrichs v.
California Teachers Association Supreme Court case.
And let's hear what they have to say.
So thanks, of course, for your time today.
What is the big picture background?
What is the backstory that has led you on what a lot of people would feel is a fairly futile, can't win, can't change the system kind of moral crusade?
I'm glad you asked that question because I would say about five years ago, I felt that way.
I felt like I couldn't win.
I've been teaching for 28 years now, but around year 24, I became very discouraged.
I had served as a union leader.
Hoping to change things within the union.
I had been a fee payer on the outside, hoping to change things that way.
I'd gone to the school board.
I'd talked to parents.
I had done everything I could think of.
And I got to the point where I really thought it was hopeless.
And so I decided that somebody I had to start educating the public on what was really going on within teachers' unions, so I started writing editorials.
I had absolutely no connections to the media, had no idea how I would get these Editorials published, but I just knew it was the right thing to do.
So that's where I started.
And to my great delight and surprise, I started getting connected with a few people who felt the same way I did and really cared.
And suddenly I was connected to the Center for Individual Rights, CIR, which is the nonprofit law firm that has been And all of a sudden, this feeling of hopelessness completely left me, and I became very hopeful, not only for the future of teachers, but for the future of the children in America, for the future of our educational system.
And when I was reading about your story about what motivated you at the beginning, which was seeing a teacher that you characterized, in your opinion, as somewhat abusive.
I actually worked in a daycare in my teens and there was one of these meanie teachers around.
It really puts a negative spin on your whole work day, on your whole work environment.
You know, productive workers tend to raise everyone's productivity and productive or destructive workers tend to lower that.
I wonder if you could talk about the quality of work.
Because the union response, of course, is that, well, you know, it makes everyone better and happier with collective bargaining and so on.
But it seems to me that if you are around negative teachers, that has a huge impact, not just on your work, but you inherit kids who just come from that teacher's classroom and you've got to kind of prop them back up again.
Isn't it a quality of work environment to have the best teachers around for everyone?
Well, yes, I agree with everything you just said.
And I'd like to back up to the first thing you said, and that was this meanie teacher that you...
And that I've experienced more than once in my career.
My question is, what about those children who have to go into that classroom every day and try to learn in that environment?
Okay, who cares about me?
And I have to work with a negative mini, which I'll address in a minute.
But what about those vulnerable kids?
You know, you said they were preschoolers.
What were they, three, four years old?
The ones I saw when I was a student teacher were first graders, six years old.
I can't learn in a negative environment, and I cannot imagine what it's like for those little kids to be literally terrified.
When you're that small, you're terrified of a situation like that, and adults have so much power over you.
So that's my first concern, is what about the kids involved in these classrooms?
But for myself and for my colleagues, yes, you're very right.
It's It's incredibly difficult to work in such a negative environment.
And one of the things that I've experienced over and over is people who've said to me, hey, you know, look, I was working really hard doing my job and a union rep came to me and said, Why are you here so late?
Why are you still working?
You're making the rest of us look bad.
You know, those aren't my values.
Those don't reflect what I believe.
I believe you work hard and you do all you can to do your best in your job.
And when you're serving little children, that's even more important.
So yes, they not only bring a negative vibe into the work environment, but they also sort of bring this lack of excellence.
And there's also this feeling that they're very powerful.
And they often get into these, oh, well, we'll just go on strike.
If they don't like it, we'll go on strike.
And there's this constant feeling of us against them, the teachers against the administration.
I don't like that.
I want to work with my administration.
I want to be a team.
Well, and it's also struck me that everybody knows parents who have their kids going to a school where there is one or more negative, destructive, or abusive teachers.
The helplessness of the parents, you know, I mean, a lot of us like, you know, Mama Grizzlies, you know, you mess with my kids and you're in trouble.
But...
The sense of helplessness, I think in particular for low-income parents, you know, they probably don't have a lot of power or authority in their lives as a whole.
Maybe their employees are somewhere low on the org chart.
And then when their children may be mistreated in schools, I think that you are probably channeling or expressing a lot of helplessness, not just the children and the teachers feel, but the parents feel with regards to how can I protect my children from teachers whose values or methodology or approach or emotional stability or what have you is very much against what I would want for my kids.
You're preaching to the choir today.
I agree with you completely.
I'll tell you, I've been that parent.
I have two boys.
My younger boy in particular, a really bright kid, but very hyper and really needs a hands-on approach in education.
He needs to touch things.
Unfortunately, he didn't get that.
Thanks to a lack of school choice, I didn't have a choice to send him someplace else.
In addition, he had a couple of teachers who were quite negative.
And I couldn't get him out of those classes.
Even as a teacher who knows the ropes and knows the tricks to how to move your kid around, I couldn't get him out of those classes.
That was incredibly discouraging for myself and for him.
And some of those things, even though he's 20 now, some of those things still bother him and have impacted him in those particular subjects.
And for the low-income parents, I agree with you completely.
Many of them are They just don't know how to approach the system.
They don't know what to do.
They're afraid.
I've experienced parents who were so upset about a situation and when they tried to complain, all of a sudden their kids weren't treated the same.
Or I know a woman who has a special ed child.
All of a sudden her child lost his iPad or whatever the special device he had in his classroom.
And she felt that she was being punished for speaking up.
And so she backed down.
And so, yes, not only teachers, but parents as well are frightened and unsure what to do.
And you know what?
We're the taxpayers.
We deserve better.
Yeah, to me, everything which diminishes a parent's natural authority over the child, benevolent authority, and exposing your children to toxic teachers that you can't do anything about, lowers the respect that the children are going to have for their parents.
That sort of undermines, to me, civilization as a whole.
Now, let's turn to some of the legal arguments.
And it would seem to me that this kind of forced association by which unions can compel dues from people who may or may not agree with the political motivations or actions or advocacy of the union, that forced association is a violation of freedom I wonder, Terence, if you could talk a little bit about what are the major legal arguments that you're bringing to bear on this matter?
Well, you're exactly right.
The First Amendment does not permit the state to compel individuals to support speech, to pay for speech with which they disagree, or to pay for organizations which are purporting to speak on their behalf.
And that includes unions.
When unions negotiate with local officials for higher salaries, they're essentially negotiating over the best use of tax dollars.
Well, some teachers agree with what unions are doing, and that's fine.
They can join the union and support it.
But other teachers, perhaps a minority of teachers, disagree with the union's emphasis on higher salaries at the expense of everything else.
And so under the First Amendment, the state can't compel them to support an organization that takes positions with which they disagree.
Another area of disagreement is, you know, the unions constantly negotiate for seniority-based school assignment policies, seniority-based tenure, and other kinds of seniority-based reward systems that make it very difficult to educate all children, to give every child the education they deserve.
Look, a lot of teachers agree with the union's positions, but some don't, and the state can't really compel We're good to go.
That this is a bedrock principle of the First Amendment, and what we're doing here is bringing in one area of the law that's fallen out of alignment with the basic principle of the First Amendment.
We're bringing that back into alignment with what everybody agrees the First Amendment has been all about since the beginning.
And do you guys have any numbers on the proportion of teachers who might oppose what the unions are funding politically?
I mean, do you have any idea how many of the teachers would, say, be Republicans as opposed to the largely Democratic funneling of money from the unions to the political parties?
Well, according to the California Teachers Association, between 30 and 40 percent of their members are Republicans.
But I think more on point to the issue we're raising in this case is that under current law, teachers are allowed to opt out of the political portion of the dues.
And in California, about 10 percent of the teachers do opt out of the political portion of the dues.
They are what's called agency fee payers.
We think that's a pretty good estimate of the number of teachers or the percentage of teachers that will opt out of the collective bargaining portion of the dues if we happen to win in our lawsuit.
Maybe more than 10% and maybe less than 10%, but that's a good starting point.
I clearly what we're talking about is the right of a minority of teachers who dissent from the union's position and who just want to have the chance to not have to pay, you know, hundreds of dollars in dues to support the union each year.
So 10 percent is, I think, a good rule of thumb for who might opt out of the whole portion of the dues if we win our case.
Right.
Now, the union's argument, of course, and I hope I'm not showing too much personal bias here when I say that government unions complaining about the free rider problem is just kind of a jaw-dropping thing for me as a guy who kind of likes Austrian economics.
So let's just say that up front and push it to one side.
But when you hear the argument that goes roughly like, well, you know, if you're going to benefit from collective bargaining but not pay for it, then you're getting a benefit that you're not paying for.
You're a free rider.
You're a parasite.
You know, all that.
What is the pushback to that?
Well, I mean, our clients don't feel like free riders.
They feel like force riders.
They, you know, for the last 40 years, they've been forced to support an organization that takes positions with which they fundamentally disagree.
So it's really the union that's been free riding on our clients and hundreds of other teachers, thousands of other teachers.
That disagree with what the union is doing.
Look, if the union wants to negotiate solely on behalf of its full dues paying members, that's fine with our clients.
They're happy to negotiate their own contracts.
They're good teachers, they're in demand, and they'd be willing to negotiate their contracts if that's the system the union wants to put in place.
There's no reason in the world why They should be forced to go along with positions that they don't agree with.
And if the union considers them to be free riders, then they'll negotiate their own contracts.
And I always hate to bring pragmatic or practical considerations into what for me is essentially a moral argument.
But nonetheless, when the unions say, well, seniority is really good for kids and the way that we negotiate is really great for kids, is there data that supports, well, you know, that teachers are just like wine?
You know, the longer they're around, the better they get, you know?
Is there any empirical data to support the contention that the current system is optimal for kids?
There's a lot of data to support that it's suboptimal for kids.
I mean, one of the predictable consequences of basing everything on seniority is that schools that serve disadvantaged children are saddled with a higher percentage of teachers that don't want to be there and don't have any choice in the matter because of the seniority rules.
And there's a lot of turnover in those schools as a result of this.
So I think that the evidence suggests strongly That the union's constant emphasis on seniority at the expense of the needs of the children and the needs of the school are hurting a lot of kids, particularly disadvantaged kids.
And our hope is that if we win our case, this will free up the schools and free up teachers to focus on issues and policies that will help those schools and help those children so that every child gets the education they deserve.
And another argument that the unions seem to be putting forward goes something like this.
People like to make more money, so there.
And, you know, I may be characterizing it with slightly less flowery language that they say, well, it's bad for the middle class at a time when it's hard for people to get along.
So isn't that sort of an admission that the unions are artificially raising the prices of people who would not otherwise be able to command that kind of salary?
Well, I think Rebecca can really speak to this.
I mean, look, some teachers are in it for the money, but a lot of teachers are in it for the children.
And if there's a tradeoff to be made here, if it turns out that less salary means smaller class size and more teacher aides, there are a lot of teachers that would opt for that.
So I think what we're doing in this case is putting in the decisions about tradeoffs like that.
In the hands of the frontline teachers who understand what these tradeoffs mean in the classroom, each teacher ought to be able to decide this for themselves, and each teacher ought to be able to decide for themselves whether they support the union's relentless effort on higher salary and greater seniority at the expense of everything else.
But again, I think Rebecca's probably in a good position to answer this directly.
Would you like me to answer it?
I'd love to.
I believe that was a pass to you.
Sorry about that.
You know, you mentioned something about this is really a moral dilemma.
That's exactly how I feel.
You know, the unions keep claiming that they offer all of these benefits to teachers like myself.
But my opinion, my very strong opinion is their benefits aren't worth the moral costs.
And Terry articulated it very well.
Something I would love to have in my classroom is a teacher's aide.
I haven't had one in probably over 20 years.
And when I did have one, it was maybe 20 or 30 minutes a day.
I'd really like to have a teacher's aide in my classroom all day because I have some high-need kids in my classroom who could benefit from a teacher's aide.
But my district can't afford that because the salaries for the teachers keep going up and up without regard to anything else.
We don't have a music program in our school.
We don't have a science program in our school.
We don't have a foreign language.
We offer the kids nothing extra.
We really have the basics.
I would love to offer those things.
I would love to be able to get more of these kids who I think We need to have some special ed services who aren't getting them.
We'd love to get them those services.
But if you keep upping the salaries of the classroom teachers at the expense of everything else, then you can't offer all of those things that are great for kids.
So that's how I feel about this constant demand on salaries.
I just completely disagree.
I appreciate making a decent salary, but I would much rather take A pay cut and not get so many salary increases for the betterment of my students and for my community.
Well, I mean, everybody wants more.
I mean, there's nothing at all wrong with that.
The question is, how do you go about getting it?
I mean, if you want to make more money, then you have to, in a free market environment, provide better services or goods.
But this is taken away in this company.
When the government wraps its coercive net around something, it kind of gets frozen in time.
You can't help but notice that 150 years ago, about when public schools came about, you had a bunch of kids in rows and a blackboard and a teacher.
150 years later, when we've gone to the moon, when I'm sure jetpacks are just around the corner, you have a bunch of kids in a room.
Now, maybe, just maybe, it's gone from a blackboard to a whiteboard.
But it seems like the degree to which this moat of government coercion around what I believe is one of the most important aspects of society, the raising of the young, It seems to have frozen it in time, and it seems that what you guys are doing is chipping away a little bit at that moat and trying to get some responsiveness to the needs of others into the equation.
Is that a fair way of characterizing it?
Yeah, I think it is.
I think, look, what we're trying to do is take a decision away from the state legislature and maybe the courts and even Rebecca Friedrichs and the Center for Individual Rights, and we're trying to put that decision in the hands of teachers themselves, the frontline teachers who They're in the best position to make the trade-offs between, for example, higher salary and more classroom aides.
I don't know what the answer is.
I doubt the Supreme Court knows what the answer is.
And we know the state legislatures have no idea what the answer is.
The people who best know how to answer these questions are the teachers themselves.
And what we're saying is that under the First Amendment, they have a right, a constitutional right, to decide which positions to support, what trade-offs to make.
You know, some of them support the union, that's fine.
A number of them do not support the union.
That's fine, too.
The First Amendment protects the right of all of those individuals to have a voice in these kinds of debates, but none of them to have the exclusive voice, and that's the problem right now.
The government has empowered one organization to speak on behalf of everyone, regardless of whether everyone happens to agree with what that organization is pushing for.
And that's wrong, and it's not allowed under the First Amendment.
Well, everyone except the taxpayer and the children who's, you know, going to be largely indebted to Chinese banksters to pay off all of these unfunded liabilities.
And Rebecca, you talked a little bit about the degree to which you find it troubling, even though you're able to opt out of some of the direct financing of the political goals of the union, that the taxpayer being absent from the bargaining table is something that deeply troubles you.
And I think deeply troubles most people who are on the paying rather than the payee side of the tax equation.
Well, that's right.
And as Terry was speaking, what was going through my mind was, and the parents, the parents, we must give a voice to the parents.
The children come from the parents and the parents are paying the bill.
They should have the first voice in all of this.
I would love to see parents working together with teachers and administrators.
I would love to see schools become a community, just a place where everyone works together for the good of the children.
Wouldn't that be great?
We can only dream of such a universe.
Now, you know, for those outside the U.S., of course, a worldwide broadcast, there is something that's a little hard for people to understand.
I'll encapsulate it really quickly, get your guys' thoughts on it.
So the Democrat Party, you know, I would argue since post-McCarthyism kind of lost the war on ideas and certainly after the fall of the Soviet Union.
So they've switched to basically getting forced union dues and importing immigrants who are going to vote left.
That's like, they've given up on the war of ideas, or the sort of back and forth of political debate, and they're just saying, well, we're going to stuff the ballot with union dues and immigrants who vote left.
To what degree do you think something like this, where, you know, the vast majority of union dues are going to the Democratic Party, to what, it's also, would you say, fair to say that it's going to force the Democratic Party to start reengaging with the American electorate in a way that they haven't had to do for quite some time?
Well, that might happen.
We can only hope it will happen, but that's going to take a few years.
I mean, these are big, powerful organizations, and even if we win our case, the California Teachers Association is still going to be the designated bargaining agent, and it's still going to command You know, millions of dollars, you know, in support each year.
So, you know, these types of changes you're talking about take many years to play out.
Certainly enforcing the, you know, the terms of the First Amendment, putting these decisions about whether to fund the union back in the hands of individuals will certainly help.
For one thing, the most immediate effect is that the 30% of the teachers who are Republicans in California will have a chance to vote with their feet.
Some of them may like the union, but a lot of them may not.
And this will force the unions to start to be accountable to the teachers.
Down the road, that may well have an effect on the Democratic Party.
We'll just have to wait and see to see whether that happens.
But we're moving in the right direction.
I would certainly agree with that.
A lot of people don't also realize just how recent some of this stuff is, right?
It was really only in the 60s that it became almost impossible to fire bad teachers.
And I think if I remember rightly, it was in 1977 that this first came about as a principle, these sort of forced union dues.
Now, in my ever and ongoing desperation to not just think that law is an opinion with a gun, what has changed with regards to the legal precedence of legal arguments from 77 when the Supreme Court first imposed what you're trying to reverse?
Well, I think even in 1977, the Supreme Court itself understood that this was an exception to the First Amendment.
And in those decisions, the Supreme Court said if this regime that we're setting up of compelled union dues ever raises First Amendment issues, if it ever turns out to be the case that the union is not reflecting the interests of all of its members,
if the union starts to take partisan positions, I think we're good to go.
You know, neutral workplace benefits and policies that benefit all teachers.
As the unions become more partisan, it's raised a clearer and clearer problem with the First Amendment.
And I think the Supreme Court has recognized that today's union is not the same.
As the unions 40 years ago, today's union raises free speech issues that weren't raised 40 years ago.
And so now today, the Supreme Court is revisiting the exception that it created 40 years ago.
And we think the record supports a big change here.
We think the unions are partisan in every aspect of their operation, not just their political lobbying, but the collective bargaining.
A lot of teachers have just fundamental disagreements with the union's relentless efforts on policies like seniority, for example.
That's a political issue.
In 1977, it was not a political issue.
But the unions have just pushed the idea of seniority so far that they've peeled off or lost a lot of their support.
And what they're arguing for now does not represent the interests of all teachers.
It is a First Amendment issue and hopefully the Supreme Court will rectify what's become a very large and egregious mistake and an egregious violation of the First Amendment rights of a lot of teachers.
So their argument was, if massive coercive power should happen to corrupt human beings, we'll revisit it in the future.
I believe that may have been a slight foreshadowing.
Now, how long has this been going on?
What's the process been like?
And when are you guys expecting a resolution of this matter?
Well, we filed the case two and a half years ago.
We asked the lower courts to rule against us because we said this is the one issue that only the Supreme Court can decide.
Only the Supreme Court has the authority to overrule its past precedents.
So the lower courts really had no role to play in this case.
And fortunately, the lower court judges agreed with us and sped this case on to the Supreme Court.
We had an oral argument on January 11th.
I think many observers thought that the oral argument went very well for us.
It appears that at least five justices are leaning in our direction.
We won't know the outcome until May or perhaps June.
We're hopeful that we have five votes, but you never know until the decision comes down.
And as I said, that should be towards the end of May or possibly the end of June.
So sometime later this year, we'll know for sure which way the court's going to go.
And Rebecca, what's it been like for you?
I mean, thrust into the public spotlight in a highly contentious issue.
I know that you've said you've got a lot of support from teachers, a little bit behind the scenes or under the radar, so to speak.
But what's it been like for you being thrust into such a public role?
Well, I mentioned before that I suddenly feel a lot of hope.
So mostly it's just been a very hopeful experience.
It's been very exciting.
I've gotten to meet the most wonderful people throughout this journey.
And people from across the United States have reached out, like you said, mostly quietly.
They'll send me an email and say thank you.
There are a lot of people who agree with us, but a lot of people who are just too afraid to speak out publicly.
And then there are a few who are speaking out publicly as well and who are gaining their courage, and that's really exciting to watch.
It's been a very positive experience.
There are a few naysayers at work.
That's okay.
I was expecting that.
And hopefully they'll be able to see that liberty is more important than union control at some point in this journey.
No, no, it's great.
You guys are, you know, working to change the world.
Nobody's waking up with a horse's head in their bed.
It's all very nice so far.
Now, as far as people who want to help out, you know, my sort of little pitch for people is don't just sit there and passively watch this stuff happen.
Engage people in your neighborhood.
Engage people in your family.
I think the time for serene Thanksgiving dinners may be a little bit in the rear view.
We're kind of at a crossroads in civilization.
I think in very many ways I sort of made this pitch before.
So I would really urge people watching this and listening to this, engage people.
People in this conversation don't just sort of sit there and say, well, I wonder what the Supreme Court's going to say, because when you engage people in this conversation, if it's not the first crack at the bat, it might be the second or the third, but you really need to keep working on public opinion.
Don't outsource the moral progress of the species, but get involved.
If people want to help you out, keep track of things, do you guys have a funding page, or do you have a page where you're keeping people apprised of the latest and greatest?
Yes, they can go to the website for the Center for Individual Rights, and there's an opportunity there, obviously, to donate funds to learn more about the case.
But perhaps more importantly, there are links up off of our webpage to a Twitter feed and a Facebook page.
The union has been very active in mischaracterizing The issue in this case, mischaracterizing the Center for Individual Rights and the motives of the teachers who brought this case.
It's very important for our listeners who are active on Facebook and Twitter to engage the union on these feeds.
And to challenge some of the things the union is saying.
So any of your listeners that are interested in this should go to our webpage.
The web address is www.cir-usa.org and they can learn about the case there and they can also participate and go to the Twitter and Facebook pages that we've set up to enable a lot of people to weigh in.
And that's very important going forward.
And I would love to add something to that.
And that is that teachers in America are very frightened.
Because they have been held down by this union for a very long time.
We've been stifled and teachers like myself who speak out are always bullied.
We're always treated like second-class citizens by the union that really has monopoly control of our workplace.
So I would ask your listeners to please If you know teachers out there, if you love a teacher, if you care about a teacher, if teachers in your family, please talk to that teacher.
Educate that teacher on the truth about our case because they're only hearing one side from the union.
And as Terry said, it's very mischaracterized.
And the second thing is, I'm just hoping and praying that those teachers will stop being afraid because, you know, we teach our students That we need to stand up together against a bully.
But unfortunately, most of us are standing all by ourselves against this bully.
And we need other teachers to stand up too.
And so I think we need the American people to stand up first and say, Okay, teachers, it's safe.
We've got your back.
You can stand up now.
So that's what I would ask people to do.
Please encourage a teacher in your life.
Don't judge that teacher for being afraid.
Offer them your support so they can find the courage to stand up.
I think it's a truism of the world and a tragic one that organizations and individuals who are abusive will always serve to isolate.
And don't let people get trapped in the cage of their own circular thinking.
Hands across the water, reach out and support people.
I believe that the majority of teachers in America and around the world got into it for Idealistic reasons to want to help children, to encourage children, and they walk kind of into a cheese grater of state and union power.
And a lot of the best leave, as you know, of course, a lot of the young teachers are leaving the profession.
It also has set up a system wherein the kids most in need of the best teachers usually end up at the worst because of property taxes and the way these things work.
and the fact that you can't put in good danger pay for bulletproof teaching requirements for certain schools.
So the system as a whole, I think, is really badly serving the children.
I think the children...
The union, I get the sense that the children are sort of like crop.
You know, they're just things that the union used to profit by the enclosure of.
And there's a lot that can be done.
And what you guys are doing legally is quite fascinating.
Now, I've, of course, asked a bunch of questions.
But is there anything that you guys wanted to add to give people as the big takeaway?
I would just like to thank them for listening today.
If they've engaged in this conversation in any way, thank you.
If they'll spread the word, thank you.
Help us grow our Facebook page, help us grow our Twitter account, because as we can grow on social media, then we can get the truth out there.
So thank you for your support.
Terrence, anything in closing, dare I say?
Yeah, I would just say that, look, the point of this case is that while some teachers agree with their union, some do not.
And really what we're fighting for is the right of every teacher to be able to decide for themselves.
I mean, look, we have choices in everything we do in life, whether it's the restaurants we go to or the clothes we buy.
The same should be true of unions.
People should be able to decide this question for themselves.
And that's really what this case is about.
If the government said, here's who you've got to marry, everybody would go up in arms.
But if the government says, here's how your children are going to be educated, everyone's like, oh, okay.
So hopefully we'll do something to change that.
Well, thanks, guys.
Of course, a great pleasure to chat with you.
Thanks for doing what you're doing.
And, of course, hopefully we can talk again once you guys get some kind of resolution to this either way.
