For the past several months, public school teachers across South Florida have been receiving mail pieces attacking their union and urging them to stop paying their union dues to the United Teachers of Dade.
Those flyers were then followed by a video released online earlier this month, in which a handful of teachers say they are disappointed with the union, known more commonly as UTD, and announcing the formation of a new group that will try and have UTD abolished.
The mail pieces and video come from the Freedom Foundation, a conservative think tank that is financed by wealthy conservative donors who have raised tens of millions of dollars over the years for what they say is a non-partisan effort to educate workers about their rights, but that critics charge is a well-orchestrated national campaign to weaken and destroy labor unions representing government employees.
"These aren't isolated state by state episodes, but rather part of a bigger arc, a bigger campaign to try and defang, defund and demobilize public sector labor unions, particularly teachers unions," said Alex Hertel-Fernandez, a professor at Columbia University who specializes in labor unions.
A former member of the Labor Department in the Biden Administration, he is the author of "State Capture," which documents the far-right's attack on worker rights.
