My teachers union calls it representation. I say there are $114 million reasons to sue them

I am in my 33rd year of teaching public school — and my 30th teaching in New Jersey. I have been a member of the New Jersey Education Association, our state’s largest teachers union, for as long as I’ve been teaching in the state. Union officials repeatedly told me that contributions to the union’s political action committee were voluntary and separate from our regular membership dues.

But during the current election cycle, I learned that the NJEA quietly sent more than $40 million from our dues to a political action committee — without the knowledge or consent of members, and without a shred of transparency.

Even worse, union officials used that money — including my money — to serve themselves. Those funds fueled former NJEA President Sean Spiller’s failed gubernatorial run, while he was still president of the union. Even when it was quite clear that Spiller had no chance of winning (he ended up finishing a distant fifth in the Democratic primary), PACs supporting him recklessly burned through piles of our dues money as Spiller was on the campaign trail — all while he somehow also served “full-time” as union president, collecting his enormous salary and benefits package from that job.

I feel betrayed. For years, an FAQ section on the union’s website plainly stated: “By law, dues money cannot be used for partisan political campaigns.” But the NJEA seems to have done exactly what it had told members was against the law.

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Over the past 12 years, a mind-blowing $114 million in teachers’ dues made its way to Garden State Forward, a super PAC controlled by the union, according to state and IRS filings.

In the past two years, Garden State Forward sent more than $40 million to another union insider-run super PAC, Working New Jersey, and to a now-defunct group called Protecting Our Democracy, which called Spiller its chair. Both groups used teachers’ dues to promote his gubernatorial campaign.

I only learned of these PACs through various news reports in the midst of Spiller’s campaign, as mailers promoting his campaign (which I was apparently funding) started piling up at my door.

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Now, I’m suing the NJEA along with another New Jersey teacher, with the help of the nonprofit law firm the Fairness Center. We believe that union officials misled us about how our dues money would be used, thus breaking our membership contracts, which represented that PAC contributions were voluntary. We’re also alleging the NJEA breached its fiduciary duty to prioritize members’ interests, not those of union insiders.

At the same time, the nonprofit New Jersey Policy Institute has alerted the IRS and the New Jersey Election Law Enforcement Commission to potential problems with how the NJEA handled its political spending.

They say that the union appears to have failed to report its multimillion-dollar donations to the Garden State Forward PAC as political activity, thus dodging tax rules. In an official request for an investigation, they also question whether the union skirted New Jersey’s cap on direct political donations — $5,800 per candidate in the race for governor — by using affiliated groups to give twice the legal amount to Spiller’s campaign.

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When questioned about my lawsuit and these filings, a union spokesperson hid behind carefully worded responses, citing “representative democracy” and “the right of our members to join together in power.”

To be fair, here’s the entire quote from the New Jersey Monitor: “‘NJEA is a member-led union that operates as a representative democracy. Our members’ decisions about which candidates to endorse and what resources to use in support of those endorsed candidates are made by our elected bodies,’ said Steve Baker, the spokesperson. ‘We will defend the right of our members to join together in power to advocate for our profession and our students.’”

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Sorry, but real democracy depends on transparency and accountability. The NJEA’s version is more like a bait-and-switch con game, designed to fool its members while union insiders spent their money supporting a lost cause.

How do NJEA officials think they can get away with this? Quite simply, I’ve seen them act untouchable by hiding the truth from teachers while instilling what feels to me like a culture of disrespect, fear, and intimidation among its members.

Does that sound like a healthy democracy to you?

My co-plaintiff and I believe that the NJEA’s dues-funded PAC spending spree broke its contract with teachers and violated its legal duty to represent our best interests. We hope that through legal action, we can ensure that the union respects teachers’ voices and returns its focus to negotiating fair contracts and high workplace standards—the very reasons I became a union member more than 30 years ago.

By mfnnews