Teachers battle NEA over politics

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State affiliates of the National Education Association, a sponsor of last weekend's pro-choice March for Women's Lives, are fighting members who have invoked federal antidiscrimination laws against the union's use of their dues to support abortion, contraception and homosexuality.

Shawn Austin, a part-time school-transportation secretary in Saranac Community Schools District near Lansing, Mich., was ordered to appear before a four-member local union committee yesterday to convince fellow NEA members of her "bona fide religious-objector status."

For two years, the union has fought the request of Mrs. Austin that most of her dues go to charity instead of supporting the NEA's political and social causes. This latest hearing was scheduled despite earlier objections from her local school board and superintendent.

If local union officers and the Michigan Education Association (MEA) agree, Mrs. Austin can join tens of thousands of NEA members who have used the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1972 Equal Employment Opportunity Act, which prohibit employers and labor unions from discriminating against workers based on religion, including "all aspects of religious observance and practice, as well as belief."

Under rulings of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the MEA would be required to apply about 80 percent of her $93 yearly NEA dues assessment -- the amount used for political and other activities not related to collective bargaining -- to a charity of her choice.

But the MEA, along with the Ohio Education Association (OEA), Washington Education Association and California Teachers Association, are "the hardheads" among state NEA union affiliates who "run religious objectors through the gantlet," said Bruce N. Cameron, a lawyer for the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation in Springfield.

Mr. Cameron, who has represented dozens of NEA members whose requests for religious accommodations were denied or stonewalled, is advising Mrs. Austin.

"The Michigan Education Association is among the worst," the lawyer said. "They require the religious objector to go through an inquisition before they will accommodate you. They are the only [NEA affiliate] who does that."

None of the NEA affiliates in 21 states with "agency shop" laws let nonmembers and religious objectors vote on the contract that controls their terms and conditions of employment or sit on the school district's grievance or teacher certification and tenure committees, he said.

"The bottom line is that in non-right-to-work states, the NEA forces nonmembers to pay for collective bargaining, but refuses to allow them to have a voice or a vote on collective-bargaining decisions or any workplace conditions," Mr. Cameron said. "Nonmembers pay the tax, but they get to vote only if they join."

The NEA and the four state affiliates named by Mr. Cameron did not respond to inquiries and written questions submitted by The Washington Times.

Mr. Cameron, who said he has not lost a religious-objector case against the NEA, said the eight-year fight in Ohio of veteran industrial-arts teacher Dennis J. Robey was a major turning point against union stonewalling.

As a result of Mr. Robey's case, the EEOC in 2002 ordered the NEA and all its state affiliates to stop using a maze of invasive bureaucratic requirements to force schoolteachers and support personnel to justify their religious faith.

Mrs. Austin, who has attended the same church with her husband for 20 years, said her religious faith "is a very private issue for me." She said she has been dealing for two years with the MEA's obstacles to her religious-accommodation request, which "was a very personal decision."

Leaders of her rural western Michigan school district have fully have supported her request, but the union insisted on a hearing and refused to relent, despite arbitration, she said.

"I've agreed to attend the hearing. I did write in December and explain with chapter and verse from the Bible what my objections were" to the NEA's positions on abortion and homosexuality, Mrs. Austin said on Saturday.

She said her local union president, who will conduct the hearing, is receiving directions from "the MEA UniServ director," a state union officer who oversees the NEA local.

"I think she is being told what to do. These people are so powerful. They have very deep pockets. As of today, I haven't a clue about what will happen," she said. "They could drag it on for a year."