Union boss wants teachers waging war for ‘social justice’

By Jason Hart | Watchdog.org

While most Americans celebrated Independence Day, the National Education Association bemoaned America’s lack of “social justice.”

In a July 4 speech bristling with leftist buzzwords, NEA executive director John Stocks implored union members to be part of a national “progressive” movement.

“America is not working for most Americans,” Stocks told several thousand representatives of the union’s state and local affiliates at NEA’s annual meeting.

Stocks, a white male who was paid $412,398 with teachers union dues last year, blamed the country’s struggles on income inequality and institutional racism.

“I personally believe that we cannot challenge institutional racism without understanding the insidious entitlements of white privilege in America,” Stocks said, noting that he himself has benefited from “white privilege.”

“Income inequality continues to rise,” Stocks said, describing a country where — in the third year of President Obama’s second term — public schools are crumbling and job opportunities are hard to come by.

Because of racism, income inequality, “climate change” and other concerns, the time is ripe for “a movement for a new American majority,” Stocks assured the crowd.

“I’ve been a part of progressive causes and social justice organizing my entire career,” Stocks said. “I know what movement moments look like.”

Brett Healy, president of Wisconsin’s free-market MacIver Institute, thinks Stocks should take a closer look. NEA’s Wisconsin Education Association Council has lost 30,000 members in the past few years.

“In December of 2014, 25 Wisconsin school district unions were rejected by their teachers and were actually decertified,” Healy said in an email to Watchdog.org. “Plus, 100 fewer local unions sought recertification in 2014, down to 305.”

This followed a year when workers represented by 80 of Wisconsin’s public-sector unions — unions that could previously take mandatory fees from nonmembers — voted against continued union membership.

“Now that government workers have finally been given a choice to join a union rather than being forced to join, Wisconsinites are voting to keep their hard-earned money instead of handing it over to the labor bosses,” Healy said.

But NEA still has almost 3 million members, and Stocks relishes his position as a power broker on the political left.

“As the nation’s largest union, we’re the ones who can bring together progressive allies to create the future we know our students need and deserve,” Stocks said Saturday.

Who does Stocks see as NEA’s “progressive allies?” Defunct fringe-left protest movement Occupy Wall Street. Union front Fight for $15. Illegal immigrants. Billionaire Tom Steyer’s environmentalist group NextGen Climate.

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