Off Target: Randi Weingarten’s Fight With Target Isn’t Remotely About Education

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Randi Weingarten is not even pretending her job is for teachers anymore. On a recent movement call with Sunrise, YDSA, and the AAUP, she bragged that she pressured Target to make a public political statement against ICE and laid out what AFT leadership wants next.

She starts by “disclosing” something she says she has not yet told her own executive council.

“I wrote to Target on February 1st… on behalf of all of the shareholders of teacher retirement systems… about 7 million shares of stock.”

That’s teachers’ retirement money being leveraged as a political cudgel. AFT leadership is now speaking as shareholders, consumers, and activist enforcers, not as a union focused on classrooms.

Then she admits she prioritized a meeting with Target over an active strike in San Francisco, and her demand to the company’s leadership wasn’t subtle.

“Why can’t you simply say, as a corporation, ‘ICE out of Minnesota?’ Why can’t you say that publicly?”

When Target says it prefers handling things privately, she escalates immediately: “My history tells me that many corporations said that to other autocrats too…” Then she spells out the real objective.

“We need to untether their relationships with this administration, which will require more and more and deeper and deeper corporate campaigns.”

“We need to do both schools and engage in these corporate campaigns…”

That’s total mission drift. Teachers’ time and attention are finite, and classrooms have bigger fires right now: staffing shortages, disorder, burnout, special ed overload, and contracts that lag reality. None of that requires Target’s CEO to issue a statement.
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CapitianMarion
@CapitianM
2h
She has no authority to even mention retirement funds. Most are hugely underfunded. The taxpayers themselves have more rights to how those funds are invested not the Union. The teachers are guaranteed a benefit only not the funds generating the benefit