The Republicans are plotting to literally rewrite the Constitution to eliminate core rights and protections. The Constitutional Convention, in the plain language of the leading organizer for it, aims “to reverse 115 years of progressivism.”
The state’s assault on public education includes a charter school real estate grab, a partnership with a fundamentalist Christian private college, and a potential statewide voucher program.
Anyone who imagined, after Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton, that the Republican right had maxxed out the possibilities for suppressing the votes of people unlikely to vote for its candidates was sorely mistaken.
The Supreme Court’s ruling was expected to diminish union membership. But so far, many unions have actually increased their numbers since the verdict. Conservative groups are working to reverse that trend in the long run.
“Taking away local control over wages (and a range of other
pro-worker, pro-environment, and pro-civil rights policies) has become
a major priority of ALEC, a corporate-backed group with extensive
lobbying resources and influence in our state legislatures,” according
to an National Employment Law Project statement. “ALEC drafts “model” minimum wage preemption
bills for conservative legislatures to simply copy and paste.”
If the U.S. Supreme Court rules in favor of a lawsuit filed by the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, every state in the country would essentially turn into an anti-union "right to work" state, which would be a significant blow to public sector unions' collective bargaining efforts and also complicate thousands of existing contracts between organized workers and municipalities, cities, counties, and states across the country.
A coalition of labor, community and environmental groups is making it clear that ALEC isn’t welcome in the union town.
Spread the word