The Gloucester County Times considers NJEA’s snubbing of Senate President Sweeney and Assembly Speaker Sheila Oliver because they backed the health benefits/pension reform plan:
While there’s probably a little boo-hooing going on in the incumbents’ households, the NJEA, with all its supposed power, just made itself irrelevant in South Jersey’s legislative contests. It didn’t back the Democrats; it didn’t back most of their Republican counterparts, candidates who largely hold the view that public worker unions are contemptible altogether.
The rest of us should just enjoy this NJEA effort to cut off its nose to spite its face, and hope it means the union’s legendary, feared “clout” is no longer disproportionate to its actual size.
A lot has been made of the fact that the NJEA won’t back Sweeney or Sen. Donald Norcross, D-5, of Camden, who are both union officials. But they can campaign on their belief that when public-sector unions demand too much, all households in New Jersey, union and non-union, pay too high a price.
