In my previous article The true playground bullies in today’s schools, I described a culture inside public sector unions that punishes dissent, tolerates intimidation, and relies on fear rather than service to maintain compliance.
Some readers asked a fair question.
If this behavior is so widespread, why does it persist? Why are workers so often trapped with no meaningful recourse?
The answer is not just cultural. It is legal.
The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld a system known as exclusive representation. Under this framework, a single union is granted monopoly power to represent every worker in a bargaining unit, including those who want nothing to do with the union at all.
The Court justifies this system by invoking labor peace. In legal terms, that means avoiding inter union rivalry, conflicting demands on employers, and administrative complexity.
On paper, it sounds reasonable.
In practice, it creates a pressure cooker where abuse is tolerated, dissent is chilled, and individuals are left exposed.
The Court does not deny that exclusive representation burdens individuals. It openly acknowledges that nonmembers are forced to accept representation by an organization they may oppose. It simply concludes that this burden is constitutionally permissible because it serves a broader governmental interest.
To balance that burden, the Court points to safeguards like the union’s duty of fair representation. That duty supposedly prevents arbitrary, discriminatory, or bad faith conduct.
Supposedly is doing a lot of work there.
Anyone who has tried to bring a duty of fair representation claim knows the reality. The evidentiary bar is sky high. Delays are routine. Remedies are limited. Most workers give up long before seeing justice, if they ever do.
Meanwhile, the harm continues.
When a worker is harassed or retaliated against by their own union, the employer almost always responds the same way. Take it up with your union. Human Resources steps aside. Management claims it lacks authority.
The worker is sent back to the very entity causing the harm.
This is not abstract. It is happening right now.
The Freedom Foundation is currently representing Jewish educators who allege retaliation, intimidation, and religious discrimination by their own unions. In multiple cases, teachers have described being targeted for objecting to antisemitic rhetoric, union sponsored political activity, or classroom content that conflicted with their faith. When they raised concerns, they were not protected. They were isolated. In some cases, they were warned to stay quiet.
In Los Angeles, this pattern escalated to the point where litigation became unavoidable. When a union uses its monopoly power to silence dissent and marginalize religious minorities, the promise of fair representation collapses entirely. These teachers did exactly what the system tells them to do. They spoke up. And the system turned on them.
This is the legal blind spot exclusive representation creates. The union controls representation. The employer defers responsibility. The courts bless the structure. The individual is stuck.
The Supreme Court has never explicitly said that harming individuals is the price of labor peace. What it has done is more subtle and more troubling.
It has knowingly tolerated foreseeable harm in the name of administrative order.
When courts repeatedly uphold a system despite clear evidence that it traps dissenters, enables retaliation, and leaves victims without meaningful alternatives, the distinction between tolerated harm and endorsed harm becomes academic.
The result is the culture I described previously.
Militant activists dominate because the system rewards intimidation. Leaders look the other way because fear keeps dues flowing. Good teachers stay silent because speaking out carries professional and social risk.
This dynamic is further reinforced by the fact that unions lobby aggressively to exempt themselves from consumer protection laws. In most industries, deceptive practices and coercive behavior trigger serious consequences. In the union world, those protections often do not apply.
That exemption is not an oversight. It is a shield.
Taken together, the message to workers is unmistakable. You may not like your representative. You may be mistreated by them. But the law has decided that efficiency and order matter more than your autonomy.
No person who chooses to be a public servant should ever be required to surrender their voice to a private corporation as a condition of employment.
Public employees may no longer be forced to pay union dues, but they are still required by law to give up their voice to a private organization that claims the exclusive right to speak on their behalf. That organization can misrepresent their values, advance political views they reject, and mistreat them, all without providing any realistic avenue for recourse.
Why do we tolerate this in public service?
Why would we ever allow public agencies, public servants, government workers, people who choose to serve the public, to be placed at the whim of a private political organization?
That is exactly what we have done.
Public sector unions are not neutral institutions. They are among the most aggressively politicized organizations in the country. Their political spending is not balanced. It is overwhelmingly partisan, with major teachers unions like the NEA and AFT directing roughly ninety five to ninety eight percent of their political contributions to Democratic candidates and causes in recent election cycles.
That is their right as private organizations.
What should alarm every American is that these same organizations are granted monopoly control over the voices of public employees, including teachers and civil servants who do not share those political views and explicitly reject that representation.
We have effectively allowed one side of the political spectrum to exert disproportionate influence over public institutions and government employees through its union proxies, then built a legal framework that defends and protects that arrangement in the name of labor peace.
That is not neutrality. That is capture.
This is not collective bargaining as most people understand it. It is coerced representation backed by legal indifference to predictable abuse.
Public servants deserve to be treated as individuals, not collateral damage.
Labor peace achieved by silencing dissent is not peace. It is enforced compliance.
And no free society should accept that as the cost of doing business.
The Freedom Foundation is committed to exposing these flaws and empowering educators to reclaim their rights. If you are tired of this system, the Teacher Freedom Alliance offers resources, support, and alternatives that put teachers first, without coercion.
Matthew Hayward is Director of Strategic Outreach at the Freedom Foundation.
