The Daily Signal just published an interesting article about Ketanji Brown Jackson’s record on unions.
In the article, David Osborne, CEO of Americans for Fair Treatment, makes the case "that labor unions’ political influence goes right to the top. That Ketanji Brown Jackson, in this case, is the nominee because she is the union-favored nominee.”
In fact, during the 2020 election, unions spent $244 million in direct contributions to Joe Biden and $1.8 billion in total political spending. That doesn’t include union members' direct contributions, either. Most of this support goes to Democrats, of course.
So Osborne looked at the particular cases where Judge Jackson had indicated she was going to be more pro-union.
It turns out that Trump had issued three executive orders in 2018 to deal with longstanding problems with the unions in federal government. Just a month later, 17 separate federal employee unions filed four separate lawsuits, and they all ended up in front of Ketanji Brown Jackson. What are the odds?
In one 120-page opinion, Jackson saw "a real value in unions being politically active, lobbying, for instance, on behalf of federal employees at the same time they’re sitting across the bargaining table from the very people that they’re lobbying.”
Osborne goes on to talk about how this flows down to communities. He says that, “at the lowest level, a school district where school boards run for office, teachers unions are very, very involved in the school board campaigns. And if they can get the school board that they want on the other side of the bargaining table, then they will get all of those outrageous demands without even having to go to arbitration.”
Of course, in Greenwich, we just saw on Sunday how close the relationship is between Superintendent Toni Jones and the President of Greenwich Education Association (GEA), the local teachers union, Lil Perrone. So close they rode in the same car together in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade.
We find it especially troubling in light of the positions that the union is pushing with respect to “racial, social and economic justice" and the provision of a full range of mental health services inside schools. Have you ever taken a look at the “Ed Justice Resources” that are offered by the union? How many resources on “Black Lives Matters” at school do we really need? How much implicit bias training? How many anti-racist primers?
By the way, there is a Board of Education meeting tonight at Cos Cob School at 7pm. If you want to offer public comments, you need to sign up before NOON today. We hope to see you there!