Randi Weingarten spent years telling teachers they don't earn enough to live.
Now she's weaponizing back-to-school season to burn down a company her own members own billions of dollars of stock in.
What she did next – and why – is the part the union doesn't want teachers to see.
AFT Teachers Union Pension Funds Hold Billions in Target Stock
Teachers across the country hold Target stock in their pension accounts – not as a choice, but as part of the retirement security they spent careers building.
The American Federation of Teacher's press materials confirm its 1.875 million members hold 6.79 million shares of Target through pension funds.
California's teacher pension system alone directly held three-quarters of a million shares as of late 2024 – worth more than $100 million.
Add Texas, New York, Chicago, Denver, and a dozen other state and city teacher retirement systems, and the total Target exposure runs into the billions.
AFT President Randi Weingarten knows all of this.
She launched the boycott anyway.
Teachers Union Target Boycott Is Costing Members Their Back to School Budget
The AFT's "Shop Smart, Support Working Families" campaign launched last week with a dedicated website, a flood of ads, and a store locator tool steering teachers and parents away from Target.
The reason had nothing to do with Target's prices, its product quality, or anything connected to education.
Target refused to publicly condemn ICE operations in Minnesota – where Target is headquartered – and that silence was enough for Weingarten to declare war.
"We gave Target ample time to stand with the communities in which they operate and help their neighbors, but its silence about federal immigration abuses has been deafening," she said in a statement.
Target didn't do anything wrong.
This is also the same Target that spent years chasing left-wing approval – stocking shelves with radical gender ideology merchandise and pushing DEI from the boardroom down.
The Left took the gifts and came back for more.
Federal agents enforcing federal law isn't a corporate emergency.
But Weingarten demanded that Target make her immigration politics its immigration politics – and when the company refused, she went after its revenue.
The AFT's store locator tool directs families toward unionized retailers that, by design, pay higher wages passed along to consumers through higher prices.
Teachers who spend an average of $895 of their own money on classroom supplies every year are now being steered toward the most expensive back-to-school options available – during the tightest spending season of the year.
And those same teachers, through their pension funds, own the company Weingarten is trying to tank.
Heritage Foundation research fellow Corey DeAngelis went straight to the legal question.
"This partisan war on Target smells like a breach of fiduciary duty given that AFT members' pension funds own 6.79 million shares of Target stock, which Weingarten has already leveraged to pressure the company into opposing ICE," DeAngelis told Fox News Digital.
He called on the Department of Justice to open a federal investigation.
He wasn't alone.
Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri had already written to the Labor Department in July asking whether AFT leaders coordinated with pension fiduciaries to use retirement assets for political objectives.
Consumers' Research sent a separate letter to acting Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling requesting a review of whether AFT-affiliated trustees – more than 50 of them, sitting on 27 public pension boards – were making investment decisions driven by activism instead of fiduciary responsibility.
Where Randi Weingarten Spent 1.4 Million in Teachers Union Dues
The pension attack isn't the only scandal Weingarten is managing right now.
The House Committee on Education and the Workforce opened an investigation in July into whether Weingarten used $1.4 million in union dues to produce and promote her 2025 book, Why Fascists Fear Teachers: Public Education and the Future of Democracy.
The Freedom Foundation dug through AFT's federal labor disclosures and found the numbers: $977,000 for legal review, more than $400,000 for a ghostwriter, and $11,000 for a fact-checker and photographer – all pulled from the paychecks of teachers who had no idea where their money was going.
Committee Chairman Tim Walberg and Rep. Rick Allen sent Weingarten a letter demanding a full accounting of every dollar spent, every contract signed, every royalty collected, and the details of a Delaware LLC that allegedly received book income.
Weingarten, who pulls in more than $500,000 a year in total compensation, called the investigation harassment.
That's where the union's money goes – a book calling conservatives fascists and a boycott that damages the retirement accounts of the teachers who paid for it.
Meanwhile, New York City public schools spend more than $40,000 per student per year and 43% of those students attend schools where more than half their classmates cannot pass basic math or reading proficiency tests.
The union that couldn't fix that has plenty of resources left over to fight Target over ICE.
More than 16,000 educators have already walked away from the AFT and similar unions to join the Teacher Freedom Alliance – an organization that focuses on classrooms instead of political score-settling.
That number should be much higher.
What Weingarten is doing right now isn't union leadership.
It's self-dealing dressed up as solidarity – and the teachers funding it are the last ones who will find out.
Sources:
- CJ Womack, "American Federation of Teachers launches boycott against Target, claims retailer 'remained silent' on ICE," Fox News, August 23, 2026.
- Corey DeAngelis, "Randi Weingarten's dirty back-to-school war on Target," New York Post, August 24, 2026.
- Ben Smith, "Teachers Paid the Dues – Now Congress Wants to Know Who Got Randi Weingarten's Royalties," RedState, July 8, 2026.
- Katherine Hamilton, "Report: Randi Weingarten Used at Least $1.4M in Teachers Union Dues on Book," Daily Caller, June 2026.
- Tim Walberg, Letter to AFT President Randi Weingarten, House Committee on Education and the Workforce, July 7, 2026.
