In an op-ed this week in the Washington Examiner, National Right to Work President Mark Mix discusses the threat to real education reform posed by teacher union bosses in Washington, DC.

Just a few weeks ago, Samuel Johnson’s centuries-old observation that a man’s knowledge he is to be hanged “concentrates his mind wonderfully” seemed quite applicable to Washington Teacher Union (WTU) President George Packer.

Of course, no one was threatening Packer with the rope or any of its modern-day equivalents when they agreed to a new contract in late June making it significantly easier for D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee to dismiss ineffective teachers.

But when he signed off on the new contract, Packer, whose WTU is a subsidiary of the mammoth American Federation of Teachers (AFT) union, faced a Big Labor boss’s worst nightmare, a rapid decline in the number of employees forced to pay to his union dues or fees in order to keep their jobs.

As recently as 2003, there were roughly 5,000 D.C. teachers who had to accept the WTU as their monopoly-bargaining agent and pay union dues or fees as a job condition. Today, there are barely 4,000. Despite the best efforts of Packer and AFT union czarina Randi Weingarten, that number is set to drop still further over the next few years.

Read the full op-ed here.

Over the years, National Right to Work Foundation attorneys have provided free legal aid to teachers whose rights have been violated by compulsory unionism.  Read about some of these cases here, here, and here.

The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia circuit affirmed a district’s court ruling to sentence local union bosses Gwendolyn Hemphill and James Baxter to jail.

The court called their case a “seven-year orgy of greed.”

Between 1995 and 2002, the conspirators stole millions of dollars from Washington Teachers Union (an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers union). As a result, a federal judge convicted two union bosses of multiple counts, including embezzlement, money laundering, false pretenses, and conspiring to commit such crimes.

Here are some of the expensive goodies these union bosses bought using money from the union dues treasury:

• A $50,000 Tiffany silver set
• A wedding reception for Hemphill’s son
• $29,000 in dental work for Hemphill and her spouse
• $19,000 in Washington Wizards tickets
• Car insurance
• Art décor for their homes
• Personal checks to themselves ($18,805 for Hemphill and $31,000 for Baxter)

According to court documents, in 2001, these union bosses stole so much money (using union dues) that the WTU union paid $925,000 to cover the credit card bills. By 2002, the union went broke and could not pay its membership fees to the AFT union.

In the end, Hemphill was sentenced to 11 years in prison and Baxter 10 years. Barbara Bullock, WTU union’s president during this period, and her chauffeur, Leroy Holmes, both pled guilty before trial.

This astonishing example of union boss greed is exactly why forced association with unions breeds corruption. Unfortunately, heinous crimes like these are sure to continue until compulsory unionism ends.