Quote:Even during the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, decades before politicians in Washington, D.C., disastrously enshrined monopoly privileges for Big Labor in federal law, civic-minded and prescient thinkers and commentators decried union bosses for resorting to coercion and intimidation against workers who wouldn’t and/or couldn’t belong to a union. A notable example was American journalist, abolitionist, and civil rights leader Frederick Douglass, who in 1874 penned an essay provocatively titled: “The Folly, Tyranny, and Wickedness of Labor Unions.”

“On more than one occasion,” wrote Douglass, “we have attempted to convince the workingmen of the absolute injury to their interests of the labor unions of this country, and also their oppressions and tyrannical course toward fellow workmen, as well as to their employers.”

As a former slave and an African American, Douglass was especially outraged by Big Labor racism that denied economic opportunities to black workers. A century and a half later, racism in Organized Labor continues to be a major problem, as illustrated by an ongoing lawsuit filed by New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin that accuses Ironworkers union bosses in the Garden State of systematically skipping over black workers when making job referrals.

But according to a ridiculous new book by Randi Weingarten, president since 2008 of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT/AFL-CIO) union, the only reason there has ever been to oppose monopolistic unionism is that you are a “fascist.” According to Weingarten, “fascists don’t like unions” because unions “make life better for all working people.” Take that, Frederick Douglass!

Weingarten’s screed, preposterously entitled "Why Fascists Fear Teachers," doesn’t just trash the considered views of civil rights pioneers like Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and W.E.B. DuBois on labor union bosses and their impact on workers. It also trashes the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which affirms that “[p]arents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that is given to their children.”

The Universal Declaration does not confine this “prior right” exclusively to parents who are able to cover the substantial financial cost of private schooling or the large opportunity cost of homeschooling.

But according to Weingarten, school voucher and tax-credit laws that empower parents who don’t have the money to pay for private schools (or lack enough available hours in the day for homeschooling) to choose what their kids are taught about public policy, ethics, and religion are “fascist”! Not surprisingly, Weingarten fails to acknowledge that actual fascist dictators like Hitler and Mussolini insisted that the government, not parents or their chosen agents, decide what children are taught.

In the days since her book was published, Weingarten has doubled down on her anti-parent stance. She has effectively stated that public-school parents who generally agree with the views espoused by the late Charlie Kirk ought to have no say about whether their children are instructed by a teacher who openly applauded Kirk’s assassination.

Of course, the only reason Weingarten’s ravings are a matter of grave public concern is that roughly two-thirds of the 50 states, including large-population states like California, New York, Illinois, and Pennsylvania, have laws on the books authorizing and promoting union monopoly bargaining over K-12 public educators.

In states with monopoly-bargaining laws, elected officials and their appointees are required to “respect” AFT and other government union bosses – but not parents or anyone else – “as equals and deal with [them],” as American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees union kingpin Jerry Wurf gleefully observed in 1973.

Weingarten and her lieutenants routinely exploit their monopoly-bargaining privileges to push for counterproductive policies such as the “staffing surge” of recent decades that has dramatically increased the number of nonteaching staff positions in public education at a time when school enrollment has been growing far more slowly or, as in the past few years, falling.

Smearing Americans who oppose special privileges for Big Labor as “fascists” may make Weingarten and her most fanatical supporters feel good. But the real reason efforts by National Right to Work Committee members and their allies to roll back monopoly bargaining in public education and other public services have advanced in recent years is that more and more Americans are coming to understand just how detrimental it is.