(LITTLE ROCK, Ark.) – On Tuesday, the Arkansas House Education Committee passed Senate Bill 473, which would require government employee unions to collect dues from their own members rather allowing the state to deduct it from the workers’ paychecks on the unions’ behalf.

Dubbed the “Teacher Paycheck Protection Bill,” SB 473 was authored by state Sen. Joshua Bryant (R-Rogers) and approved by state Senate a week earlier. The bill now heads to the Arkansas House floor, where it is sponsored by state Rep. Grant Hodges (R-Centerton).

Last week, the Kentucky State Senate overrode Democrat Gov. Andy Beshear’s veto of a similar measure, making teacher paycheck protection the law of the land in that state.

Meanwhile, paycheck protection bills are working their way through the Florida and Tennessee legislatures.

There are several reasons why so many states are taking up these bills, explained Rusty Brown, southern director for the Freedom Foundation.

“First, this kind of legislation is necessary to keep up with the times,” he said. “It’s good fiscal policy to eliminate government involvement when there’s no longer any reason for it. In this case, the technology is available for any organization to implement a variety of payment options. But teacher unions are not just any organization; they’re highly political and states should be mindful of who they are helping to fund.”

More pointedly, teachers are have grown increasingly weary of funding their union leadership’s radical political agenda, and parents are tired of their children’s education and future being held hostage to it.

Since COVID lockdowns began in March 2020, more than 141,000 teachers have resigned their union membership from the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT).

In response, NEA President Becky Pringle used a recent Department of Labor panel discussion to double down on her union’s activism. “For us at the NEA,” she said, “education justice must be about racial justice. It must be about social justice. It must be about climate justice. It must be about all of those things for our students to be able to come to school ready to learn every day.”

Roughly a third of all NEA dues money collected by the states is immediately exported to the union’s national headquarters in Washington, D.C., Brown noted.

“Obviously,” he said, “teachers’ union leaders attack these bills because they know that if they actually have to ask people to pay their membership dues instead of having them automatically deducted before the school employees see the money, the unions will have to justify what they charge for the service they provide. And they know many school employees will decide to keep that money for their own budgets rather than funding teachers’ union politics and massive bureaucracy.”