(The Center Square) – More than seven years after the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Janus v. AFSCME, the Freedom Foundation has announced that it has directly helped a quarter of a million public employees nationwide opt out of union membership.
In the 2018 Janus decision, the Supreme Court ruled that public-sector employees cannot be forced to pay union fees as a condition of their employment, striking down a previous precedent and finding such fees violate the First Amendment’s free speech rights by compelling speech and/or subsidizing ideas with which they disagree.
The Freedom Foundation, a conservative, right-to-work think tank and advocacy group based in Olympia, Wash., describes itself as “battering the entrenched power of left-wing government union bosses who represent a permanent lobby for bigger government, higher taxes, and radical social agendas.”
Besides Washington the Freedom Foundation also has offices in Oregon, California, Pennsylvania and Ohio.
Freedom Foundation CEO Aaron Withe spoke with The Center Square on Monday.
“In 2025 alone, we’ve helped over 50,000 people to opt out of their unions. That’s a record-breaking year for the Freedom Foundation,” he said. “What it really means is over $40 million out of the hands of unions and their radical political agenda. It’s money that’s back in the pockets of workers and money that they can spend now on Christmas, on gas, on groceries, whatever it is that they need to.”
Withe says that much of the Freedom Foundation’s work focuses on educating teachers and other union members about how their dues are being spent.
“Government unions in America are spending billions of dollars every election cycle on politics,” he continued. “And now we’re giving these workers the chance to reclaim that money and take back what’s rightfully theirs. So this is a huge milestone for us and continues to keep the trend in America where more public employees are leaving their unions.”
The Freedom Foundation launched a new initiative in 2025 explicitly aimed at supporting teachers who opt out of union representation.
“We had a goal to get 1,000 people signed up by the end of the year. We’ve had over 6,000 teachers join the Teacher Freedom Alliance since then,” Withe noted. “What that tells me is that there is a huge appetite for teachers not only wanting to leave the union, but they want something that’s an alternative. Something that’s pro-America and pro-capitalism. And that’s what we provide at the Teacher Freedom Alliance.”
The Center Square reached out via email and phone to the Washington Education Association for comment on some of Withe’s criticisms, but did not receive a response.
WEA has referred to the Freedom Foundation as an “extremist political group.”
“The Freedom Foundation and other anti-union groups don’t support us or our students — and are actually fighting against what our students need to be successful. Their goal is to eliminate public-employee unions and to weaken our public schools. They are outspoken supporters of the privatization agenda of charter schools and vouchers,” the WEA says on its website.
According to Withe, teachers who reach out to the Freedom Foundation often express a desire to simply teach the basics: reading, writing and arithmetic.
“Most teachers in America today do not want to teach critical race theory or gender theory, or this woke gender ideology that the unions are spitting in our faces all the time,” he explained. “They want to help our kids get prepared for either the workforce or the next stages in their academic careers. They do not want to teach all this radical stuff that the unions are making them teach.”
In the seven years since the Janus decision, the 250,000 who have opted out of union membership, according to the Freedom Foundation, have cost unions more than $700 million. That is based on an average of $950 spent on union membership dues per employee each year.
