MICHIGAN RIGHT TO WORK: 8,000 TEACHERS REFUSING TO PAY UNION DUES

Just over a year ago the state of Michigan passed a right-to-work law ruling that the state's teachers cannot be forced by law to belong to a union as they had been before. Since then the state teachers union has claimed that it lost only a few members. Still the union was also forced to admit that 8,000 teachers have stopped paying dues.

In October of last year, the Michigan Education Association (MEA) made the claim that "99 percent" of its members remained happily unionized despite the state's ten-month-old worker freedom law.

It is true that the union has allowed some teachers to leave without opposition as long as they had filed their separation papers last year in August, the one month during the year that the union claims teachers are "allowed" to leave. State law does not sanction this. It is only a union policy.

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