Virginia was born in an argument about freedom. Before the Bill of Rights, there was a Virginia Declaration of Rights. Before there was a nation, Americans believed government exists to serve the individual, not the other way around. That inheritance is why I’ve spent my career defending the idea that free markets, free minds, and a free society are not luxuries, but are the bedrock on which everything else in American life is built.
That is also why I’m partnering with the Freedom Foundation in their mission to protect worker freedom.
For years, I’ve watched government union bosses in state capitals across this country trade on the language of “workers’ rights” while quietly stripping public employees of the very rights that make America the bulwark of freedom: the right to speak freely, the right to think for yourself, and the right to say no. Freedom of speech and freedom of conscience aren’t just clauses in the First Amendment; they are sacred promises. For too many public sector workers, those promises have gone unkept.
When that promise is broken, it can have dramatic consequences. A home-care provider was locked in a room until she agreed to sign a union card. More than a dozen documented cases of workers whose signatures were forged onto union membership forms they never saw, let alone signed. Jewish teachers and professors forced to fund unions that have turned a blind eye to open antisemitism in their own ranks. These are not abstractions. These are our neighbors, teachers, correctional officers, and caregivers, who never consented to being spoken for, and who have had nowhere to turn when the union that claims to represent them stops representing their values.
This is what happens when compulsion replaces choice, and it is precisely why the Freedom Foundation exists: to give public employees back the freedom that union bosses have spent decades taking from them, one payroll deduction at a time.
I’ve seen this fight up close in Virginia, where union allies in Richmond have made no secret of their ambition to unwind our Right to Work protections, the same protections that have made our Commonwealth a magnet for jobs and investment for generations. Right to Work isn’t an anti-union slogan. It’s a simple, commonsense principle. No American should be forced to join or fund an organization as a condition of holding a job. Weakening this law wouldn’t empower workers; it strips away their ability to say no. It is the definition of worker freedom, and I intend to fight that effort with everything I have by assisting an organization that has the track record, the litigators, and the resolve to win that fight state by state.
Nowhere is that disconnect between union bosses and union members more obvious than in the teachers unions. These organizations like to present themselves as the voice of every teacher in America, when in reality, as we saw during the COVID school shutdowns, it was the opposite. Just this summer, the National Education Association’s Representative Assembly elected leadership tied to a Democratic Socialists of America convention, pushed through new transgender ideology resolutions for the classroom, and raised member dues to pay for it. This isn’t new: the Chicago Teachers Union has sent delegations to Venezuela to study Hugo Chávez’s “Bolivarian Revolution” as a model. A recent analysis of the NEA’s own $450 million annual budget found that less than 10% of it went to anything resembling direct representation of members — contract fights, grievances, the actual job of a union. The rest fuels a political machine that most of the teachers paying into it never asked for and don’t agree with.
Survey after survey shows the teaching profession is far more politically diverse than its union leadership, a meaningful share of teachers identify as moderate or conservative, and plenty of self-described liberal teachers have no interest in DSA-style politics in their classroom or their contract. In New York City, teachers themselves have described watching a small, highly organized socialist caucus capture their union and steer it away from bread-and-butter representation toward permanent activism. This is not democracy but rather a hostile takeover of an organization funded by mandatory dues, and it is exactly why so many teachers who love their students and love this country feel like their union no longer speaks for them — because it doesn’t. It speaks for its leadership’s politics, on their dime, whether they like it or not. That is precisely the model I believe that every state that values liberty should reject: an end to taxpayer dollars subsidizing union politics, full stop. Public money should educate our kids, not bankroll a political operation most taxpayers, and most teachers, never agreed to fund.
I’m assisting the Freedom Foundation because free markets, free minds, and a free society don’t defend themselves. They require people willing to stand up for the individual against entrenched, well-funded special interests, even when those interests hide behind sympathetic language.
On the 250th anniversary of the “New Birth of Freedom” that is the United States, we understand that Americans didn’t win their freedoms by staying quiet or passive. I’m honored to be part of a movement to stand with thousands of teachers, caregivers, and public servants who simply want the freedom to choose for themselves.
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Jason Miyares served as Attorney General of Virginia, 2022–2026, is a Partner at Torridon Law PLCC and serves as a Senior Advisor to the Freedom Foundation.
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