By Ben Velderman
EAGnews.org

LANSING, Mich. – In the wake of Michigan officially becoming a “right-to-work” state in March, some pro-union teachers are looking to drop their Michigan Education Association affiliation, in hopes that another bargaining agent will be more responsive to their needs.

A sizeable number of teachers are sick of the MEA’s hyper-partisan ways that put politics and special interest concerns over the practical needs of rank-and-file members, reports Bridge Magazine.

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And now that “right-to-work” has freed Michigan educators from forced unionization, local teacher union leaders are scrambling to find ways of retaining those members who have had enough of the MEA’s radical ways.

Recently, teachers in the Roscommon school district jettisoned the MEA in favor of an independent union, which costs them less in annual dues and provides better service.

Jim Perialas, president of the new Roscommon Teachers Association, said the switch was made because MEA leaders “were unresponsive.”

“We just were not getting the bang for the buck,” he told Bridge Magazine.

Perialas expects other unions will follow Roscommon’s lead.

“It’s going to break wide open,” Perialas said. “All kinds of local unions are in various stages of doing what we did.”

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The Police Officers Association of Michigan recently approached teachers in a small school district in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula about dropping the MEA for POAM.

The Bridge Magazine captures the MEA’s predicament: “So, in addition to fighting incessantly with Republicans at the State Capitol over school funding and policies, the MEA now confronts isolated poaching from a fellow member of the labor movement.”

Union teachers are also discovering that other unions charge much smaller dues payments than the MEA.

Roscommon teachers, for example, are now paying $600 a year in dues to the new union. That’s down from the $962.40 they were paying in combined dues to their local, state and national unions.

Once the association builds up its war chest, dues could drop to $400 a year.

The MEA is trying to put a brave face on the troubling trend.

A union official told Bridge Magazine that there’s nothing new about local unions looking for other representation.

“Small units might leave, but they tend to come back,” said MEA Executive Director Gretchen Dziadosz.

That might be how things used to work. But that was before “right –to- work.”

If the state’s largest teachers union doesn’t start appealing to politically conservative and moderate educators and focusing on education-related issues, this exodus of members and local affiliates might become a serious problem for the once mighty labor group.