The executive director of the Northwest Accountability Project (NWAP), a union front group, is complaining that the Freedom Foundation is sending emails to public workers informing them of their new right to quit paying their union for representation they don’t want. 

NWAP dramatically declares public workers are “being bombarded by a torrent of spam” from the “anti-worker” Freedom Foundation.  Of course, by spam the NWAP means emails making sure public workers know about and understand the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent landmark ruling (Janus v. American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees) freeing them from being forced to pay their union as a condition of employment.  Oh, and by anti-worker NWAP means believing every worker should have the freedom to choose whether to pay a union.

It gets better.  NWAP makes the ludicrous (yet entertaining) claim that the emails are “interrupting the workday of public workers” and “wasting taxpayers’ money” because they are sent to their work email.  According to NWAP, the simple act of Freedom Foundation emailing public employees at work constitutes an “abuse” of public resources because taxpayer dollars pay for those work email accounts.  Presumably the workday interruption is the few minutes it takes for a public worker to open the email and read it, or the few seconds to simply “mark the email as spam or junk” if they follow the sage advice of NWAP.

Funny how NWAP has never complained about the interruption to the workday of public workers, and the corresponding waste of taxpayers’ money, with the law that gives government unions a minimum 30 minutes of on-the-clock (aka taxpayer-funded) time with every new state worker to convince them to pay the union. 

The captive-audience meetings give the union the opportunity to talk workers into signing membership authorization cards that commit them to having a portion of their paycheck sent to the union with heavy restrictions on their ability quit paying the union should they change their mind.  Not surprisingly, through a series of public records requests, the Freedom Foundation has discovered these taxpayer-funded meetings are often high-pressure, coercive and blatantly misleading with numerous reports of workers reporting feeling “tricked,” “intimidated” and “forced” into signing.

Not a peep from NWAP expressing outrage over this waste of taxpayers’ money that benefits government unions.   

Nor has NWAP expressed any outrage with the workday interruption and colossal waste of taxpayers’ money that comes with the practice of paid “release time,” whereby public workers receive their full, taxpayer-funded salary and benefits while away from their job so they can work for their government union. Every year millions of dollars in taxpayers’ money is diverted away from our state’s school district and agency budgets to pay salaries and benefits to public employees who take paid time off to work (sometimes even full-time) for their union—a private entity. 

None of NWAP’s inane complaints are surprising.  After all, this is the same group that earlier this year ranted that “right-wing,” “special interest” groups (specifically Freedom Foundation) use their nonprofit, tax exempt status to avoid paying taxes. No mention was made of the fact that government unions are also special interest groups (with a strong partisan bent) that are registered as nonprofit organizations and so do not pay taxes.  And certainly no acknowledgement that NWAP itself is a nonprofit, partisan, special interest organization that enjoys tax exempt status. 

One can’t help but wonder if NWAP simply doesn’t get the delusional hypocrisy and irony of their complaints, or if they just think it will go unnoticed.  Either way, it makes for fun blog fodder.