This week, National Taxpayers Union (NTU) is participating in the nationwide effort to inform union employees of their rights known as National Employee Freedom Week (NEFW); which will take place from June 23-29.
During NEFW, a diverse, bi-partisan coalition of over 50 organizations will join forces to equip union employees with the information necessary to make the decision about union membership that is best for them, including non-union alternatives that may better suit their needs. Events are scheduled to take place in over 30 states.
The idea of NEFW grew out of a discovery by the Nevada Policy Research Institute (NPRI) last summer: While right to work movements have found success passing legislation in numerous state legislatures, many union employees in these States did not know the full extent of their new freedoms; even when they did, many did not know how to navigate the procedural requirements to resign their membership.
To explore the issue further, the Institute launched a small scale-information campaign to let teachers in Clark County, Nevada know that they could opt-out of the Clark Country Education Association by submitting written notice from July 1 to July 15. The response to the Institutes information was tremendous and hundreds of teachers elected to opt out. When asked why they had not resigned from the union earlier, many of the teachers responded that they simply did not know or that they forgot due to the inconveniently short drop period window. NPRI realized that the experiences of the Clark County Teachers were not isolated and that millions of union members across the nation faced a similar dilemma. In response, NPRI determined that a large scale effort would have to be launched to inform union employees across the nation of their rights—NEFW had been born.
NTU is proud to be a part of the first NEFW. NTU has a long history of supporting the right of employees and employers to enter into contract, free of union interference. History demonstrates that mandatory union membership harms both parties’ involved by raising costs for businesses and decreasing employment opportunity for workers.
