Here’s what the American Federation of Teachers union “agency fees” would have been spent on absent the favorable ruling in Janus vs AFSCME, which said that public unions can no longer make non-union employees pay into union coffers as a condition of employment.  These are actual resolutions to be offered at the AFT’s convention this weekend.

Keep in mind, too, that those agency fees typically ran to 60% to 80% of member union dues—which gives an idea of how much a public union’s intake was spent on politics rather than on member matters.

• single-payer health care
• opposition to the Dakota Access pipeline
• President Donald Trump’s “immediate resignation or removal”
• denounce[ing] Mondelez for moving Nabisco cookie production to Mexico [and non-union plants]
• urg[ing] local affiliates to pressure “employers to sell or carry only Nabisco products made in free union workplaces in their schools and on their campuses.”
• support for “anti-war groups”
• removal of the US’s Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system in South Korea, which “enhances the effectiveness of a US first strike with nuclear weapons by drastically weakening any nuclear retaliation by a potential target nation such as China or North Korea”

Regarding that last, I certainly wish it were true that THAAD would drastically weaken an enemy’s second strike, especially after its first strike.  That’s secondary, though.  Primary is the lack of relationship with actual education or with enhancing a teacher’s ability to teach that these AFT resolutions have.

The union does have a couple of education-related resolutions.

• free college
• [urging] “school districts, colleges, and universities to offer their students diverse views about military service and the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, balancing arguments for military service and ROTC training with the arguments of critics of military service, including its health risks.”

Yeah, those are serious education proposals.