Throughout her presentation, former public school teacher and anti-union activist Rebecca Friedrichs led participants in a simple chant.
“Education?” she offered.
“Cartel!” they had quickly learned to respond, though somewhat feebly at first.
“A minus,” she gently chided, garnering chuckles. It was a playful reminder of her background as a teacher, burnishing her legitimacy as she walked participants through her argument that labor unions have been co-opted by communists to do the devil’s bidding and destroy the country.
Friedrichs was speaking at AmericaFest, an annual conference convened by Turning Point USA (TPUSA) and held in December in Phoenix. TPUSA has gained notoriety for orchestrating some of the Right’s most celebrated and effective culture war attacks, including the outrage and backlash it created over the manufactured claim that public schools are teaching critical race theory. Its growing success in the past five years has launched the organization and its founder, Charlie Kirk, onto the national stage as a MAGA darling and a key player in the field operation for Trump’s 2024 reelection campaign.
Friedrichs’ presentation, titled “Raising Our Voices: For the Heart and Soul of Our Students,” was a rallying cry against teachers’ unions, which she blames for protecting child abusers, increasing illiteracy rates, eroding gender norms, and undermining parental authority.
In 2017, Friedrichs founded For Kids & Country, an organization that describes its mission as exposing “unions as abusers who’ve transformed our schools into social, sexual and political warzones, on purpose” — which is why she’s leading the charge to “make it safe, popular and heroic for teachers to reject unions in defense of our kids and country.”
Friedrichs presented her case at a breakout session of Turning Point Academy, TPUSA’s network of private Christian schools, which are increasingly funded by public tax dollars thanks to private school voucher programs. One attendee estimated that between 150 and 200 people attended the session.
Turning Point Academy works to seed what it calls 5C schools: Christian, classical, conservative, collaborative, and cost-affordable. “Church, schools, and community exist to serve God and the family,” the organization states on its website.
After her session, Friedrichs announced on Facebook that Turning Point Academy had dubbed her January’s “Education Warrior.”
Before Janus, Friedrichs
For decades conservative donors and activists have attempted to roll back union protections for workers and have often focused on the most public-facing of government employees: public school teachers.
After teaching for 28 years, Friedrichs, who compared paying union dues to “handing the devil money,” joined with nine other teachers and the Christian Educators Association International to sue her union, the California Teachers Association. In their suit they argued that teachers should not be required to pay “fair share fees” that help fund collective bargaining, which benefits all employees regardless of union membership. The plaintiffs were represented by the Center for Individual Rights (CIR), which, like many conservative organizations, considers fair share fees to be an unconstitutional prohibition of the right to free speech. CIR is a right-wing legal outfit funded by the Bradley Foundation and is known for its opposition to affirmative action, the Voting Rights Act, and unions.
The 2016 Supreme Court case, Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, resulted in a 4 to 4 deadlock after the sudden death of Justice Antonin Scalia prevented an anticipated conservative victory.
Despite the temporary loss, the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), tried to capitalize on the ample press coverage by rebranding their model “right-to-work” bill as the “Friedrichs Public Employee Freedom Act,” as the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) previously reported.
Two years later, in Janus v. AFSCME, a case brought by child support specialist Mark Janus against his union, SCOTUS overturned the 50-year-old precedent that held fair share fees to be legal.
Most of the right-wing organizations that submitted amicus briefs in the Friedrichs case — including the Freedom Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, the Pacific Legal Foundation, and the libertarian Goldwater Institute — also submitted briefs in the Janus case.
In lawsuits, anti-union organizations focus on “carefully selected and appealing plaintiffs like Illinois child-support worker Mark Janus and California school teacher Rebecca Friedrichs” and use “relentlessly pro-worker” language, according to an investigation by CMD’s Mary Bottari.
Yet behind closed doors, the true purpose of these lawsuits is clear: “to deal a ‘mortal blow’ to progressive politics in America.”
Toward the end of her December session, Friedrichs urged audience members to fight against the influence of teachers’ unions by coaching friends and family members on how to leave their union.
In suggesting that teachers might hesitate to leave a union for fear of losing their liability insurance, she included two options for alternative insurance providers, according to materials obtained and reviewed by CMD. The providers she recommended — Christian Educators and Association of American Educators — claim to be professional organizations that offer an alternative to unions but are regularly cited by anti-union organizations as options for siphoning teachers away from their unions.
Christian Educators, a religious nonprofit that describes itself as “a growing ministry with the mission to support, connect, and protect Christians serving in public education,” joined Friedrichs as a plaintiff in her lawsuit against her union.
Despite the Right’s continued demonization of unions, a nascent rise of pro-labor conservatism has begun to emerge.
Senator Josh Hawley (R–MO) has introduced a pro-labor framework for the 119th Congress and is one of a handful of Republican lawmakers who have come out in support of the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, which would make it easier for workers to unionize. (Hawley reversed his position after previously opposing the legislation.) Former U.S. Representative Lori Chavez-DeRemer (R–OR), another of the few Republicans to support the PRO Act, has been nominated to serve as Labor Secretary, and Senator Marco Rubio (R–FL), tapped to be Secretary of State, has cited the Catholic tradition which sees “the essential role of labor unions.”
Yet right-wing foundations and Christian school activists don’t appear to be changing their tune on unions any time soon.
“If you see somebody doing something nasty, don’t call that person a teacher,” Friedrichs warned. “Call that person a union activist.”
Colleen Scerpella contributed research to this article.
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