Catherwood LibraryILR School

With the right to work laws in Michigan about to become one year old, the Michigan Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers ? Michigan are finding that the members who resigned in August were only the start of the trouble the laws would cause for the unions. About 1% of the MEA?s 150,000 members resigned, but worse is that over the past six months the union has turned to collecting agency practices to get members to voluntarily send in their dues. Without a mechanism for collecting dues of all members simultaneously, the union must devote a huge amount of resources to collecting and processing all of its remaining member?s dues. About 8,000 of the remaining 149,500 members still have not filled out the necessary paperwork so the union can automatically deduct dues from paychecks or bank accounts, meaning that the union must contact each of these members individually each pay period. Many unions in Michigan have thus far been spared the disruptive changes because their last contract is still in effect, but will soon have to adapt in the same ways that the teachers? unions have had to.