Given the ever-widening scope of the Freedom Foundation’s outreach efforts in New York, it was only a matter of time before Big Labor took notice, placing us firmly in the crosshairs of their well-funded propaganda machines.
In fact, we’ve been made aware of campaigns by several unions representing public employees in the Empire State to discourage their members from engaging with us. CSEA/AFSCME Local 1000 (CSEA) has gone above and beyond in its attempts to frighten their members from even thinking about looking into their First Amendment rights.
Unfortunately for CSEA, even its members aren’t falling for the lies. Not only are they continuing to opt out in larger and larger numbers, but they’re also telling us about the sad state of affairs facing CSEA members still ensnared by the union.
As noted in the Freedom Foundation’s Valentine’s Day update, CSEA boldly went as far as placing a phony “scam alert” on the front of its website for all their 230,000 members to see.
We’ve also been informed by former CSEA members the Freedom Foundation continues to be a hot topic of discussion at local union meetings, with union leadership continuing the trend of lying to their members and hoping they won’t investigate the facts for themselves.
But when we follow up with CSEA members to see for ourselves how they really feel about their union, they don’t hesitate to tell us that paying dues to CSEA is the real scam.
One former dues-paying member told us he opted out because he had seen his co-workers left twisting in the wind without representation too many times, and that CSEA had thrown them under the bus during contract negotiations.
Using the resources at optouttoday.com, he was able to break free of the union with ease, and now he urges his co-workers to follow suit whenever he gets a chance.
Another former CSEA member told us she had never seen such a corrupt union, and that she was greatly relieved to have finally stopped contributing to a divisive machine that clearly didn’t have her best interests in mind.
She was so delighted to have opted out, and she even volunteered to hand out literature about opting out to her co-workers.
Yet another member, who recently opted out CSEA, told us he has friends represented by other unions, and they used to poke fun at him for paying for such lousy representation from CSEA.
The same employee told us he had previously been a member of two other unions, but CSEA was the worst union he had ever been involved with, hands down. His local rarely held union meetings, didn’t inform members about their financial contributions to political causes and, for a time, didn’t even provide a union representative to call if he had a workplace grievance.
When he was initially contacted by the Freedom Foundation’s outreach team, he was thrilled to discover he didn’t have to pay for such sorry representation, and now that he’s opted out, he gets to have even more fun telling his unionized buddies about the money he’s saving.
These were just a few examples of the many encouraging stories coming in from former dues paying members of CSEA. Even though CSEA is actively discouraging their members from looking into their First Amendment rights to decline union membership and dues, many of those members aren’t buying it.
The ones who look further quickly begin to understand that voluntarily paying union dues to such a dysfunctional big government union is the real scam. As we continue to conduct outreach across the state, you can bet that many more members of CSEA as well as other big government unions will come to the same conclusion.
