The United Teachers of Dade (UTD) has failed the employees of Miami-Dade County Public Schools for nearly 50 years, but its members will soon have the chance to deny the union further access to their wallets.  

The union’s desperation to cancel, postpone or prevail in a mandatory decertification election has reached the point where organizers have started barging into classrooms and harassing teachers in front of the kids they’re trying to teach.  

In a last-ditch effort to boost its sagging membership numbers, UTD called in the big guns, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) to help the organizing drive. Together, CTU and UTD organized a districtwide Zoom meeting this past week to appeal directly to the teachers of Miami-Dade. 

A whopping nine people joined the call.  

UTD then sent out a mass email telling teachers that union leaders have been working hard to serve their interests for decades and “have the receipts” to prove it. 

If the call is any indication of how the teachers of Miami-Dade feel, they’re looking to cash those receipts in for a refund.  

Chicago has become one of the most dangerous cities in America, if not the world. So much so that the city is exploring the possibility of publicly run grocery stores because they can’t keep businesses going to provide even the most basic needs for city residences.  

Even the largest companies can’t afford to do business in the Windy City. Earlier this year, Walmart, for example, announced the closures of several Chicago locations due to lack of profitability.  

In a prepared statement, the company said:

We know the community will have questions about why we are closing these locations. The simplest explanation is that collectively our Chicago stores have not been profitable since we opened the first one nearly 17 years ago – these stores lose tens of millions of dollars a year, and their annual losses nearly doubled in just the last five years.

To anyone with an ounce of common sense, it’s clear Chicago is far from the example we want American cities to emulate, and yet that’s precisely where United Teachers of Dade has turned for help and support.  

This is the kind of ignorance that has led teachers away from UTD in the first place, and the reason they’re unable to recruit new members effectively.  

With the new recertification requirements that came into effect under SB 256, for the first time in half a century, it’s likely UTD will be standing for re-election early in 2024, when the teachers of Miami-Dade will get to vote on whether the union has earned the right to continue sitting at the bargaining table for them.  

UTD is clearly worried.   

The vast majority of teachers enter the profession to help children, not fight a war on the values of students and their parents. Sadly, UTD and other subsidiaries of corporate labor unions, like the National Education Association (NEA), don’t see it that way, which creates a major disconnect between them and most of the teachers they represent.  

Taking a look at financial statements from the NEA, its priorities are unmistakably clear. Almost a third of its budget is devoted to politics and political organizations. A quarter goes toward officer salaries and benefits, while a mere five percent is spent on representing NEA members.  

In real dollars, the NEA spends $13 per member per year actually representing its members. Last year, the union spent almost twice as much on benefits for its own employees as it did on representing NEA’s three million members.  

Teachers are smart, and the realization that more than half of their dues is sent out of the district to fund the NEA’s massive bureaucracy and political agenda is bound to trigger questions the union can’t answer.  

Not the least of these is the question of whether the union has outlived any usefulness it might once have had.  

Rusty Brown is the Southern Director for the Freedom Foundation. www.FreedomFoundation.com