The new school year started early this September and that’s to our advantage. Our schools and colleagues are in a better place than they have been for almost a decade, but retirees, the middle class and workers across the country continue to take it on the chin. That means we have a lot of work to do.

The bad guys are out in full force, helped by recent antilabor Supreme Court rulings.

ALEC — the American Legislative Exchange Council — is one of the bad guys. And the bad guys never go away.

ALEC tries to fly quietly under the radar as it works through state legislatures to dismantle all the progressive achievements and the social safety network that organized labor and its political allies have built up over the last century.

ALEC boasts of having 300 or more corporate members and 2,000 members of state legislatures (who keep their membership under wraps) who secretly design “model bills,” 1,000 of which are introduced in statehouses across the country by these legislative members annually with one in every five enacted into law.

As an analogy, think of the 2003 Medicare Modernization Act written by pharmaceutical representatives that created the “donut hole,” which forbade the government from bargaining collectively for lower drug prices for Medicare recipients as the Department of Veterans Affairs is allowed to do.

More than 98 percent of ALEC funding is corporate money (funded by the likes of the Koch family foundation, among others) and, while it describes itself as nonpartisan, its members, speakers, alumni and award winners are a “who’s who” of the extreme right.

The legislators are wined and dined at retreats at corporate expense, raising ethical and legal concerns. And since ALEC has been considered a not-for-profit group, taxpayer dollars support its efforts. So those of us being assaulted pick up ALEC’s expenses through public funding.

No wonder it treads quietly.

Ironically, it is gaining unwanted attention for recent successes in:

Education: ALEC’s “model” bills advocate for policies that defund public services, distort the curriculum and undercut educators.

Labor: ALEC bills include right-to-work laws, “paycheck deception” laws, minimum-wage repeals and attacks on unions’ ability to work on behalf of members. Wisconsin, which established collective bargaining and pension benefits, has seen them assaulted. In Ohio, it took a concerted union campaign to overturn anti-labor legislation. Michigan has become a right-to-work (for less) state. Find anti-worker rights advocates and you’ll find legislators working with ALEC.

Retirement: ALEC seeks to wipe out public pension systems in favor of private 401(k) plans and to privatize Social Security and Medicare.

Voter suppression: Since 2011, 37 states have passed laws restricting voter access. Many of those proposals contained elements of ALEC’s model voter ID bill, all blatant attempts to limit certain categories of voters.

But as ALEC’s influence has been made public, 400 state legislators have renounced ALEC’s corporate agenda. Fearing bad publicity, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Amazon and Kraft are among corporations that have dumped ALEC. New supporters include Google, Yahoo and Facebook.

What can we do? Checkout www.ALECexposed.org to see the damage the group is doing. Help us identify the secretive ALEC state legislators by reaching out to your state representatives and asking them if they are members.

Also, write a letter to your local newspapers that are usually eager to publish letters from their readers. To see a model letter see Resources for writing letters. Send a copy to us and we’ll post it.

Remember: ALEC and the other bad guys never go away. But neither do we.