Today, educators across the state who are on the Hawaii Department of Education’s Lotus Notes email system were sent a message trying to get members to drop their HSTA membership.
The email violated DOE policy and your privacy rights. HSTA immediately contacted the DOE, which is taking steps to block future illegal spam campaigns.
This kind of illegal tactic has been used across the country by the Freedom Foundation, a mainland-based, billionaire-backed anti-union think tank. Their goal is to weaken workers’ rights and lower employee wages and benefits that were hard-fought by labor unions across the country.
Union opponents used similar tactics in Wisconsin and because of their actions, state employees saw their benefits decrease by 18.7 percent. By contrast in Hawaii, we recently negotiated a contract that resulted in 14-percent wage increases and drastic improvements to the burdensome nature of teacher evaluations.
As a union, we continue to fight to increase funding for public schools, cool our hot classrooms, reduce over-testing of our students and advocate in other areas that are important to our members and our students.
Even though these billionaires are spending money to attack our union, 98 percent of our members have chosen to be HSTA strong! If any of your colleagues ask you about this drop campaign, please remind them of all the reasons why we need to stay together.
In this new era, these attacks will become common. This anti-union group also targeted our union brothers and sisters at HGEA in a similar email drop campaign.
We are stronger together and must remain as one ohana and as one union. Thank you for your commitment to Hawaii’s children and for being a part of HSTA.
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