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By WIN GRUENING

In 1962, President John Kennedy issued Executive Order 10988, paving the way for federal workers to organize and bargain collectively.

Few knew then the far-reaching effects of that order.

During the 60s and 70s, states and cities followed with a flood of laws granting state and local public employees collective-bargaining rights.These laws required government employers to negotiate with unions regarding pay, benefits, and working conditions. They also required nonmembers to pay so-called agency fees to the union for its representation.

After the initial surge, the public-sector unionization rate remained steady for 40 years, with around 40 percent of government workers unionized. That rate began declining in 2011, due to passage of right-to-work laws in Michigan, Wisconsin, Indiana, Kentucky and West Virginia.

In the last decade, government-labor relations has become intensely political. It has topped many state legislative agendas and been the subject of litigation in state and federal courts, including the Supreme Court.

The cost of union-negotiated public-sector pay and benefits (which can exceed what comparable private sector workers earn), combined with hundreds of billions of dollars in unfunded pension liabilities for retired government employees, are crushing state and city budgets.

This has led many governors to attempt to roll back overly generous public-sector union contracts hoping to reduce the cost of government and improve employee efficiency.

Right-to-work laws now exist in 27 states, guaranteeing that no person can be required, as a condition of employment, to join a union, nor to pay dues to a labor union.

In 23 other states, including Alaska, where public sector employees have been forced to join the union or pay agency fees, worker dissatisfaction has continued to mount with escalating annual union dues that increasingly are funneled to local, state, and federal political campaigns.Often, unions take political positions and make contributions to candidates and causes in direct conflict with many union members own wishes.

An egregious example of this was when the Los Angeles teachers union demanded, as a condition for re-opening schools last fall, a federal school bailout of $500 billion; Medicare for All; a $10 billion wealth tax; a $4.5 billion millionaire tax; defunding of the police; and eliminating charter schools.

Yet, teachers who disagreed had no recourse but to continue paying union dues if they wanted to keep their jobs.

In 2018, the U.S. Supreme CourtslandmarkJanus decisionaffirmed the First Amendment rights of all public employees. No longer can state or local government employees be forced, in order to take or keep a job, to belong to or pay union dues unless theyaffirmatively consentto do so. Agency fees are now illegal in all 50 states. In short, the decision extended right-to-work to all public-sector workers throughout the country.

But the fight is far from over.

Some statesare passing union-backed legislationmaking it more difficult to leave a union.Many workers remain unaware of their rights underJanus.

InAlaska,Governor Dunleavy issued an administrative order in 2019making it easier for workers to know their rights through an opt-in program where unionized state employees affirmatively agree to have union dues deducted from their paychecks.

Under Alaskas new policy, state workers must declare each year that they want to opt into the union and acknowledge they are not required to have such representation.

Unions immediately filed objections to this interpretation of theJanusdecision and a judge temporarily halted implementation.But, while the legal case advances, public employees still have the right to opt-out.

Predictably, union opposition toJanusin Alaska has reached hyperbolic proportions. The leadership of NEA-Alaska, representing our states teachers, is begging employees to ignore social media ads advising of them of their right to opt-out and declaring the ads are seeking to destroy unions and public education across America.

Nothing in theJanusdecision suggests that. Individuals must have the right, but cannot be compelled, to join a labor union. Union membership, whether youre a teacher, police officer, ferry worker, or clerk, should be a personal choice with each person weighing the pros and cons of joining.

That is the freedom all Americans enjoy under the First Amendment.

After retiring as the senior vice president in charge of business banking for Key Bank in Alaska, Win Gruening began writing op-eds for local and statewide media. He was born and raised in Juneau and graduated from the U.S. Air Force Academy in 1970. He is involved in various local and statewide organizations and currently serves on the board of the Alaska Policy Forum.

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Win Gruening: Public sector unions vs. the First Amendment - Must Read Alaska

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Are you kidding me? We now have the governor of our state Ron D and Richard Corcoran our education commissioner instructing our teachers how to teach history! Rather than tell the truth good, bad, and ugly, we should white wash it and tell our children how perfect we have been for 245 years. The next thing they will tell us is what books they can use to teach, and what books need to be put on the bonfire! Remember the books burned in Nazi Germany in the 30s. I sincerely hope somebody will tell these two goofballs that teachers are protected by the First Amendment. What a tragedy we have come for elected officials to be so diabolical in their right-wing philosophy. David Lee, Fleming Island

As we observe FathersDayJune 20 it will be a good time to consider the following:

This breakdown of the family contributes greatly to todays problems. Any man can be a father a child but there is so much more to the important role of being a dad in a childs life.Fathersare central to the emotional well-being of their children. Studies show that if a childs father is affectionate, supportive and involved he can significantly improve a childs cognitive, language and social development as well as academic achievement.

Children who live in fatherless families are five times more likely to live in poverty, are twice as likely to drop out of school. Ninety percent of male prisoners in America today between the ages of 16 and 30 grew up separated from their biologicalfathers

Go towww.fatherhood.gov. There are valuable tips and resources for Dads in Responsible Fatherhood.

Paul and Marie Schaefer, St. Johns, Florida

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Letters: Teachers are protected by first amendment, despite the governor's take on history - The Florida Times-Union

How much academic freedom do K-12 teachers actually have to teach what they want? How far does the First Amendment go in shielding them? And where would they stand in the face of new state laws taking aim at the use of critical race theory or the teaching of antiracist lessons?

Measures introduced in at least 20 state legislatures to rein in teaching about race and other controversial and divisive topics have thrust teachers into uncertainty over what they can discuss in the classroom and whether they would face discipline or other legal consequences if they overstep.

This would make me hesitate now on some lessons about race, said August Plock, a social studies teacher at Pflugerville High School, near Austin, Texas. It potentially puts a chill over teachers.

Texas is one of five states where legislators have passed proposals so far this year limiting how teachers may address race issues in the classroom, with laws already signed by governors in Idaho, Iowa, Oklahoma, and Tennessee.

These measures pose a host of legal questions. For example, John Rumel, a law professor at the University of Idaho, said the measure passed in his state raises First Amendment free speech issues.

If Im a K-12 teacher, Im not sure what I can do, said Rumel, a former general counsel to the Idaho Education Association. Can I mention there is a rubric known as critical race theory that exists? Im not espousing it. This measure would give me pause as a teacher and might chill my speech.

While its too early for any of the new laws to have been challenged, the wave of legislation has teachers wondering how much leeway they have to veer from approved curricula or to address issues proscribed by state laws.

The blunt answer: While K-12 teachers retain some protections for their comments on issues of public concern, they dont have much in the way of academic freedom to veer from the curriculum or infuse their own experiences and views into the classroom.

I am reluctant to come to this conclusion, but in the K-12 sector, teachers do not really have any academic freedom, said Richard Fossey, a recently retired professor who taught education law at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and has co-written several journal articles on the topic.

Suzanne Eckes, an education professor at Indiana University-Bloomington who has also written about the issue, said that under a series of decisions from the U.S. Supreme Court and the federal courts of appeals, K-12 teachers do not have the type of academic freedom that courts have recognized for college professors.

You dont have a lot of leeway, Eckes said she tells teachers. If a teacher called me and said, I want to teach the 1619 Project or about the Tulsa race massacre but my supervisor has advised me not to, I would sympathize with them, but would add that they could get in trouble for teaching those concepts.

The laws passed or proposed so far generally prohibit schools from teaching that one race or sex is inherently superior, that any individual is consciously or unconsciously racist or sexist because of their race or sex, and that anyone should feel discomfort or guilt because of their race or sex.

Some adopted or pending measures specifically mention critical race theory, a decades-old academic framework that examines how racism has shaped the U.S. legal system and has become the crux of controversies across the country.

Richard Fossey, retired law professor, University of Louisiana at Lafayette

At least two proposals specifically singled out as a prohibited topic for the schools the 1619 Project, a long-term reporting effort by The New York Times that has been turned into a curriculum centered around the year that enslaved Africans were first brought to colonial America.

But it remains unclear to what degree the various pieces of legislation address specifics of whats actually being taught in the nations schools.

Very few school districts will say out loud, Were adopting critical race theory, said Daniel R. Suhr, a lawyer with the Chicago-based Liberty Justice Center, which has sued a Nevada charter school and a Virginia school district over some of their anti-racism curricula or policies. They might say, Were embracing equity.

Critics often cite critical race theory as the basis for many diversity and inclusion efforts, regardless of how much the framework has actually informed those programs.

Many teachers, of course, freely express their opinions in their classrooms and make instructional decisions that veer from the approved curriculum.

I was a high school teacher, and I was always giving my political opinion and nothing ever happened to me, said Eckes, the Indiana University education professor. But that was due more to the grace of school administrators than any legal protections.

The U.S. Supreme Court has recognized academic freedom for professors and institutions at the higher education level, with a 1967 decision calling the college classroom the marketplace of ideas.

When it comes to K-12 teachers, the high court has made some lofty pronouncements, such as its language in the landmark Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District decision on student speech, which declared that neither students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.

Education law scholars also can point to a handful of cases in which K-12 teachers did win court rulings in support of their classroom expression. In the 1960s and 1970s, teachers won cases after being fired for uses of the F-word, for using a controversial role-playing method to teach about Reconstruction, and for distributing surveys to students about sex, drugs, and euthanasia.

But in 2006, the Supreme Court ruled in Garcetti v. Ceballos that public employees generally do not have First Amendment protection for their on-the-job speech.

In a friend-of-the-court brief submitted in the Garcetti case, the National Education Association had argued that to teach is to communicateoften on matters of the greatest public importance and controversy. A decision that failed to recognize First Amendment protection for job-related speech would have a devastating impact on teachers, the union said in its brief.

Garcetti involved an employee of a prosecutors office. In his majority opinion, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said the court was not deciding whether its analysis would apply in the same manner to a case involving speech related to scholarship or teaching. The line was perhaps a response to a dissent by Justice David H. Souter, who expressed concerns about the effect of the majoritys principle on academic freedom in public colleges and universities.

Since Garcetti, numerous courts have ruled that the potential exception for scholarship and teaching did not apply to K-12 educators.

In a 2007 case, a federal appeals court upheld the non-renewal of an Indiana middle school teacher who had expressed her opposition to the U.S. war in Iraq to her students, which had led to parent complaints.

Another federal appeals court, in a 2016 decision, upheld the discipline of a Chicago 6th grade teacher whose principal overheard him teaching his students not to use the N-word. The teacher was suspended for five days for using verbally abusive language in front of students, even though the teacher was trying to explain why the word was offensive.

In a 2010 decision, a federal appeals court upheld the non-renewal of an Ohio high school teacher who had centered a lesson around banned books that included some selections parents considered inappropriate. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit, in Cincinnati, analyzed the competing interests at stake in that case, Evans-Marshall v. Tipp City Exempted Village School District.

On the one side, doesnt a teacher have the First Amendment right to choose her own reading assignments, decide how they should be taught and above all be able to teach a unit on censorship without being censored or otherwise retaliated against? the court said. On the other side, doesnt a school board have the final say over what is taught, and how, in the public schools for which it is responsible? Who wins depends on which line of legal authority controls.

The appeals court sided with the school district, holding that Garcetti applied because the teacher was acting pursuant to her job duties and the First Amendment does not extend to the in-class curricular speech of teachers in primary and secondary schools.

Stuart Stuller, Colorado attorney representing school boards

The 6th Circuit court recently appeared to reaffirm the distinction on academic freedom between college professors and K-12 teachers. A 6th Circuit panel ruled in March that an Ohio college professor who refused to use the preferred pronouns of a transgender student because of the professors religious beliefs was protected by academic freedom.

The college had punished a professor for his speech on a hotly contested issue, in violation of the First Amendment, the court held. The court said in a footnote that its 2010 ruling in Evans-Marshall was limited to schoolteachers.

Fossey, the University of Louisiana professor, said the Supreme Courts Garcetti decision has been really hostile to the view that K-12 teachers have any control over the curriculum or even their teaching style.

Stuart Stuller, a veteran Colorado attorney representing school boards, said the rationale for districts supervision of teachers on-the-job speech is that when the teacher is standing in front of the classroom, that teacher is a representative of the state.

The First Amendment doesnt necessarily give subordinate employees the right to do something the supervisor has told him not to do, said Stuller, who is nonetheless sympathetic to academic freedom concerns of teachers and once wrote a law journal article on the subject.

Teachers and other public school personnel still have First Amendment protections for speaking out on matters of public concern outside of their job duties, even when those matters involve the operations of their employer.

That was underscored by another controversy this month in the 82,000-student Loudoun County, Va., district outside Washington, D.C. A state judge ordered the reinstatement of an elementary school teacher who was suspended after speaking up at a school board meeting against a proposed gender-equity policy that would include requiring teachers to address transgender students by names and pronouns used by those students. The district received several complaints about the teachers public comments and placed him on administrative leave because of the disruptive impact his remarks had on his school, court papers say.

The state judge on June 8 issued a temporary injunction in favor of the teacher after analyzing the case under Pickering v. Board of Education of Township High School District 205, a 1968 Supreme Court decision that a teachers speech on a matter of public concern is protected under the First Amendment if it outweighs the employers interests in workplace efficiency and lack of disruption.

Alice OBrien, the general counsel of NEA, said the new state laws limiting what teachers and schools may say about racism and other matters are certain to be challenged in court, though likely not on the grounds of teacher academic freedom.

These are situations where the state legislature is prohibiting the instruction of certain concepts in the schools, she said. These laws are aimed at instruction across a state, and that is a different context than that of an individual teacher right.

Such challenges will likely be based on the 14th Amendments equal-protection clause because the measures were enacted with racial animus, OBrien said. And they could be subject to challenge based on the First Amendment right of students to receive information, she said.

OBrien pointed to rulings that resulted in the invalidation of an Arizona law that barred public schools from instituting an ethnic studies curriculum, such as by holding classes or programs that promoted resentment toward a race or class of people, that were designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group, or that advocated ethnic solidarity instead of treating students as individuals.

The law was pushed for by a Republican state superintendent of public education and was targeted at a Mexican American Studies program in the Tucson school district and challenged in court.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, in San Francisco, in 2015 held that the law was not unconstitutional on its face, but allowed the challenge to proceed based on evidence of discriminatory purpose in the enactment and enforcement of the law. A federal district judge in 2017 struck down the Arizona law on equal protection and First Amendment grounds.

These statutes want schools to impart a particular view of America, said OBrien. They are intended, at the very least, to chill speech. And they seem to be having that impact.

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If Critical Race Theory Is Banned, Are Teachers Protected by the First Amendment? - Education Week

It may be dubbed the "Promoting Rights and Online Speech Protections to Ensure Every Consumer is Heard" (PRO-SPEECH) Act, but a new bill from Mississippi Republican Sen. Roger Wicker is anything but First Amendment-friendly. Wicker's measure would ban huge swaths of online content moderation, forcing private internet forums to host speech that may currently violate their terms of service and be considered hateful, harassing, vulgar, or otherwise undesired.

The bill would also take aim at freedom of association and free markets, disallowing some tech servicessuch as app stores and cloud computing companiesfrom choosing what products they offer or what businesses they'll contract with.

Introduced Thursday, the so-called PRO-SPEECH Act strikes at the heart of First Amendment protections, compelling companies under threat of sanction from the government to platform messages they otherwise wouldn't.

Essentially, Wicker's bill is "net neutrality" legislationsomething that was vehemently opposed by Republicans of yorebut for online content platforms, search engines, and marketplaces rather than internet service providers. The bill would make it illegal for digital entities to block or impede access to "any lawful content, application, service, or device" that doesn't interfere with platform functionality or "pose a data privacy or data security risk to the user."

The bill would also explicitly ban taking action against a user based on "political affiliation." Tech companies could no longer choose to ban, for instance, Nazi content or decline to host web forums devoted to white supremacist political groups. Web forums couldn't choose to be exclusively for conservative users, or progressive users, or so on.

"Approximately zero people actually want" the Internet this bill would create, Daphne Keller of the Stanford Cyber Policy Center commented on Twitter.

Notably, the bill would exempt from some provisions any company that "publicly proclaims to be a publisher."

It has been a common conservative delusion that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act already turns on some sort of vital legal distinction between "publishers" on one hand and "platforms" on the other, with platforms having a responsibility to remain neutral conduits for content and only publishers allowed to set any rules for what types of content they will carry. This is not actually the way that Section 230 works.

But "Senator Wicker is trying to make the ridiculous and nonsensical 'publisher/platform' distinction an actual thing, despite the fact that this is blatantly unconstitutional," writes Mike Masnick at Techdirt. "The end result is that this bill leans into the moderator's dilemma and creates two types of internet sites: complete garbage dumpswhere no moderation can take place, and Hollywood-backed squeaky clean productions. It wipes out the parts of the internet that most people actually like: the lightly moderated/curated user-generated aspects of social media that enable lots of people to have a voice and to connect with others, without being driven away by spammers, assholes, and abusers."

In addition, the bill also redefines anti-competitive behaviorthe backbone of antitrust law violationsto include any large company blocking, prohibiting, or discriminating against any platform that competes with any part of its own business. No matter how many of a company's rules the quasi-competitor violated, it would have to be allowed.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) would have broad discretion to enforce the law, making it ripe for politics-based abuse. Small internet businesses would be exemptexcept for when the FTC decides they are not.

Violations would be considered unfair and deceptive practices under the Federal Trade Commission Act. Anyone could register a complaint with the FTC alleging a violation, creating a massive new undertaking for the commission as internet moderation police and a massive new layer of bureaucracy for tech companies, which would be required to respond to every complaint.

In essence, the law would quite literally make a federal case out of every aggrieved YouTuber who gets demonetized, business that thinks its search results aren't high enough, troll who feels he deserves a right to say whatever he wants online, etc. If tech companies don't issue a reparation to the complainant, the FTC would be forced to open an investigation within five months.

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The PRO-SPEECH Act Is Anything but First Amendment-Friendly - Reason

American democracy is in danger, and American journalism needs to respond with more than slogans.

Editorials are a good start and the Boston Globe has nowset the bar awfully damn high.

But the mightiest weapon in the journalistic arsenal isn't opinion columns.It's relentless news coverage.

Journalists have the unique ability to ask questions on behalf of the public, demand answers, assess truthfulness, decry stonewalling and do it all again the next day.

To rescue and revive democracy, news organizations don't need to "take sides" with one party or another, and they don't need to publish articles full of opinions.

What the top editors in our top newsroom must do, however, is set the agenda. They need to decide what is newsworthy, and then bring their resources to bear accordingly.

That's the true power of the press.

And those editors should start with an easy one by relentlessly covering the Justice Department's recent outrageous seizures of reporters' communication records. That means news storiesevery dayuntil the public is able to fully understand how they were authorized and by whom, how they were allowed to proceedand what will prevent similar occurrences in the future.

Assaults on freedom of the press aren't "inside baseball." These are the front lines. This is a huge story. As David Boardman, dean of the journalism school at Temple University, tweeted:

The formerly secret subpoenas were for records from reporters at the New York Times, the Washington Post and CNN, in order to identify their confidential sources. Two of the subpoenas were accompanied by outrageous gag orders. (Gag orders on news organizations!)

Their overdue public disclosure by the Justice Department in recent weeks made major headlines and spawned a number of angry opinion pieces.

But with the notable exception of the Times, there's been relatively little news coverage since then. (On Thursday night, the Times continued its streak with abarnburnerreport that Trump's DOJ had similarly subpoenaed communications records of Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee.)

What's particularly missing even from the Times coverage is the application of pressure on the current Justice Department leadership to fully explain what happened, when, why and how. That should be the drumbeat, every day.

Although the various leak investigations originated during the Trump administration, they extended well into Biden's. A huge element of this story is why those investigations weren't immediately abandoned and condemned and why the Justice Department under Merrick Garland won't come clean about what happened.

Some of the opinion pieces were powerful, particularly the one from the normally invisible Washington Post publisher,Fred Ryan.He appropriately pointed out that "the Biden Justice Department not only allowed these disturbing intrusions to continue it intensified the government's attack on First Amendment rights before finally backing down in the face of reporting about its conduct."

In fact, it was the Biden administration thatimposedthe gag order on the New York Times's lawyer, preventing him from disclosing the government's efforts to newsroom leaders or the four reporters whose email logs were at issue.[UPDATE June 13, 12:30 p.m.: Technically, the gag order was imposed by a federal magistrate judge, responding to an application from the Justice Department. The March gag order amended aJanuary orderthat had fully gagged Google from talking to anyone about the records request. TheMarch orderallowed Google to tell the Times's lawyer, but imposed a gag on him as well.]

"This escalation, on Biden's watch, represents an unprecedented assault on American news organizations and their efforts to inform the public about government wrongdoing," Ryan wrote.

The Justice Department on June 5 announced that it would no longer use subpoenas or other legal methods to obtain information from journalists about their sources, elicitingsome new headlines.

But that should not have placated anyone in the news business. What it should have prompted is a slew of additional questions about how this new policy would be applied in an accountable fashion.

AsAnna Diakun and Trevor Timmwrote in the Columbia Journalism Review, the new policy is "a significant improvement to the DOJ's previous approach. Still, there are questions to be answered. When will the DOJ officially update its news-media guidelines to reflect this change? And as theTimesnoted, the DOJ's statement appears to leave some 'wiggle room' surrounding the circumstances in which the policy applies, limiting it to when journalists are 'doing their jobs.' What exactly does this mean?"

Their final, critical question: Who will the Justice Department considera member of the news media?

None of the news reports I saw about the policy shift showed anything likethe appropriate skepticism. For that, you had to watchtelevision interviews with some of the reporters who were directly targeted.

On CBS Now, for instance, Times reporterMatt Apuzzomade the crucial point that there's no reason to take the Justice Department at its word until it fully explains itself. "First we have to understand what happened. How did it happen? Why did it happen?"

"This is becoming a bipartisan pattern," Apuzzo said.

Journalism groups are justifiably concerned.Bruce D. Brown, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said in a statement that "serious unanswered questions remain about what happened in each of these cases."

And by coincidence, the esteemed free-press advocate Joel Simonannounced this weekthat he will step down after 15 years as executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists. He told the Times: "Governments are increasingly taking aggressive action toward journalists, and there are very few consequences."

In addition to the three demands for records in leak investigations, we also learned in the last few days about a Biden-era demand from the FBI that deserves more coverage. The FBI issued a subpoena to USA Today, demanding it hand over identifying information about readers who had accessed a particular story online during a 35-minute window.

The request related to a Feb. 2 articleabout the shooting death of two FBI agents while serving a warrant in a child exploitation case in Florida. The 35-minute window in question was more than 12 hours after the shooter had killed himself inside his barricaded apartment.

The request was bizarre and inexplicable, and should have been blocked by superiors. Instead, it was only withdrawn "after investigators found the person through other means, according to a notice the Justice Department sent to USA TODAY's attorneys Saturday."

How could that have happened?

Some of the ideally relentless news coverage would also involve questions for the news executives who received subpoenas.

Why did New York Times lawyer David McCraw honor such an obviously absurd gag order? (The order, imposed in March, related to records that were four years old, evidently as part of a fishing expedition aimed to show that former FBI director James Comey disclosed a "secret" document that wasmost likely a hoax. I am not making that up.)

Why, once McCraw was allowed to discuss the request with Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger and CEO Meredith Kopit Levien, didtheyhonor the gag order? Why didn't they just call a press conference?

There are much tougher questions for CNN, which in its own reporting buried the fact that it caved to the Justice Department'srequestfor reporter Barbara Starr's email logsfor June and July 2017.

CNN lawyerDavid Vigilante, honoring a gag order the whole time, apparently fought the Justice Department's request from May 2020 all the way through Januaryof this year. He even won a court ruling that CNN shouldn't have to turn over the logs of emails that were internal to the company.

But that, apparently, was what CNN cared about most. So six days into the Biden administration, CNN turned over a list of Starr's external email contacts during the specified time period to the Justice Department.

CNN'sofficial lineis that those were "essentially records that the government already had from its side of these communications."

Sorry, that doesn't cut it.

Transparency and accountability for everyone!

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To save democracy, let's start by saving the First Amendment - Salon