What You Need to Know about Anti-Union Mailers

You may have received fancy postcards, personalized emails, or phone calls encouraging you to drop your union membership from a group called the Freedom Foundation. The Freedom Foundation is a free market conservative think tank that is funded by anti-union establishments like the Walton Family Foundation and the State Policy Network as well as climate denial foundations like the Sarah Scaife Foundation. Essentially, the Freedom Foundation is a front group for wealthy special interests.

The foundation runs a campaign called Opt Out Today, through which it urges union members to opt out of paying their union dues. It is a deceptive marketing campaign to try to get union members to leave their unions. 

These anti-union campaigns spend billions of dollars because they know labor organizing empowers workers. Unions allow us to advocate for better working conditions and a higher quality of life together. Each of us in CFA are united in our fight for academic freedom, faculty rights, safe workplaces, higher education, student learning, and racial and social justice. 

CFA is a member-led union and our voices are stronger together. We know that union membership means building solidarity with your colleagues and having your voice represented in the workplace. We choose to take active roles in our union to shape our workplaces and communities. 

Our union is only as strong as our membership. Without strong membership, we lose our ability to bargain for a fair contract and make our voices heard. Contrary to what Opt Out Today claims, paying membership dues is essential to receiving the pay, benefits, and protections unionized workers are known for winning. Strong representation in grievances is also directly correlated to a robust membership. 

The purpose of the Freedom Foundation campaigns is to get rid of jobs in the public sector. Weakening unions and workers’ voices is the most powerful way of doing so because unions protect workers from managerial abuse and exploitation.

Unions are also one of the few organizations fighting back against fascism. Through our unions, workers build collective power across sectors and mobilize against authoritarianism. We know the importance of being invested in protecting both democracy and fair working conditions.

CFA dues are only 1.35% of your gross CSU pay. We have secured a cumulative 10.25% in General Salary Increases along with significant increases to base salaries since our strikes in December 2023 and January 2024. Dues are necessary to help us with those gains but also incomparable to these raises. Other victories include increasing paid parental leave and improving access to gender-inclusive restrooms and lactation spaces.

Your membership helps improve workplace conditions for the 29,000 lecturers, professors, coaches, counselors, and librarians who make up our union. Membership supports our essential work, like contract bargaining and faculty rights. Membership also supports our efforts to secure state funding for the CSU and sponsor legislation that provides the best learning and working conditions. 

Investing in our union is powerful and results in more leverage at the bargaining table. Our collective power has also allowed us to make gains in raising the floor for our lowest-paid faculty, quality health insurance, better working conditions, and protections against cultural taxation. Cultural taxation refers to the unique burden that faculty of color and other underrepresented faculty face in carrying out responsibilities to the university. 

Every CFA member strengthens our union, enabling us to bargain and mobilize for the best possible contract. With our union, we have the power to shape working conditions and address faculty concerns.

Meanwhile, the Freedom Foundation wants to cut public services and dismantle the government. Their goal is to eliminate public sector employees and replace them with privatized contractors from big corporations. 

The fact that the Freedom Foundation is putting to work its union-busting resources is indicative of our success at transforming the CSU. They are paying attention to us because we are improving both our working conditions and student education at a public university. 

The Freedom Foundation doesn’t actually care about us workers. They want to dismantle our solidarity by having us focus on our own individual woes rather than work together. 

We encourage you to report Freedom Foundation emails as spam and return mailers back to the sender. 

Together as CFA members, we will continue to fight for better wages and improved working conditions so that both faculty and students can thrive.