Workers have a right to collectively bargain, and once they exercise it, they have a right to protection from corporate-funded operations designed to strip them of their union. These days the donor class relies less on argument and more on covert pressure campaigns, lavishly bankrolled, to hollow out the unions workers depend on. The latest example is New York, where Gov. Kathy Hochul on Wednesday signed a bill that protects public employees from nonprofit groups that pressure them out of their union membership.
The new law makes it illegal to “falsely impersonat[e] an employee organization or employee-organization representative,” and that is precisely the practice the Freedom Foundation has built its campaign around. The targets are donor-backed operations that flood public employees with mailings designed to exploit the Supreme Court’s decision in Janus v. Afscme (2018) and drain unions of members and money — steering workers out the door in the name of the very Janus right the foundation cites for cover.
The Freedom Foundation, a corporate-backed anti-union operation, reaches tens of thousands of workers through mailings sent by the foundation or its front program, Opt Out Today. The mailers are engineered to pass themselves off as something they are not: to mislead members into distrusting the very organization that negotiates their wages and benefits. The law rightly presumes workers cannot judge their union’s value proposition when an impersonator is doing the talking.
The Freedom Foundation boasts that some 7,500 public union members have responded to its mailers by opting out — a meaningful but limited haul, achieved only through relentless, deliberately misleading outreach. But the cost for the nonprofit to keep running its impersonation operation will now be what it deserves, and that is the law’s point. Deception this widespread is fraud, and fraud should not be cheap. Each alleged offense could garner a $1,000 fine — a fitting penalty for a campaign built to undermine workers’ right to collective bargaining.
The law gives the state Attorney General the authority to act against a person who “has engaged or is about to engage in the false impersonation of an employee organization.” About to engage? That provision lets the state stop the next mailing before another worker is tricked. Attorney General Letitia James is exactly the right official to bring this case, and workers are right to demand she enforce the law against the think tank. The preemptive power is precisely what is needed to stop a lavishly bankrolled union-busting campaign before it bleeds a local dry.
Smart union members know exactly what the Freedom Foundation is afraid their members might hear: that the donor class has built a quiet machine to undo what a century of collective action built. Workers told the truth have nothing to fear from hearing it. The only people who need deception are those whose case cannot survive an honest hearing.
