In the scheme of the worst thing ever that will end the world, the Supreme Court’s decision in Janus v. AFSCME owned it for maybe an hour. Having already explained why public sector unions shouldn’t exist at all, my antipathy toward them means I will cry no tears for the hardship Janus will cause.
The Janus ruling threatens to diminish them further. State and local public-sector workers in collective bargaining states are unionized at a rate of 53.7 percent, but the decision could end up reducing union membership by 8.2 percentage points.
Workers will have to reconstruct this countervailing power and find new ways to build solidarity. We’re going to have to get bold again.
Note Bryce Covert’s use of the word “we.” She’s not a public sector employee. She’s not part of any “we,” because if she was, she wouldn’t write such tripe. Once a union seizes control of a collective bargaining unit, it owns its members, who are forced to pay agency fees by employer deduction from paychecks. In Agency Shop states, the employees may not be members, but they pay nonetheless under the theory that they get the benefit of union representation and shouldn’t be permitted to freeride.
Unions didn’t arise out of nowhere, but out of the desires of employees for collective representation. If unions fail to serve their members, then there’s no reason for them to exist, and certainly no reason for them to enjoy forced payment of dues from unwilling employees. This is doubly so when the use of union dues went toward supporting candidates whom union members were against, supporting laws that employees found repugnant, supporting speech that employees had to pay for but rejected.
The Abood decision was supposed to fix some of that, but it was at best half and loaf and at worst a sham. Unions could charge non-members for their collective bargaining services, but not for their ideological promotion. Except that the employees were charged for everything from the big building the union owned to the business agent’s Porsche, freeing up money to spend on condemning Israel and buying legislators votes to maintain union power.
If unions can no longer force unwilling employees to pay their dues, is this a travesty for workers? Shills and the terminally insipid use warm and fuzzy words like “solidarity” to cover the problem. If workers wanted unions, they would want to pay their dues. The reason union membership is feared to drop precipitously isn’t that workers are greedy freeriders.
After all, the workers are the very people for whom unions exist. Or at least did at the time the notion for born and the labor movement was popular. Unions and their fellow travelers seem to forget that part, that unions have no reason to exist beyond serving workers. If workers don’t want to support unions, then there’s your answer.
There will be all sorts of efforts to workaround Janus. Already, California has a law in the works to overcome the rule, at the expense of workers, naturally. Other ideas, like trying to redesignate public employees to private, or states reducing its employees’ wages and paying off unions with “contract administration fees.”
Politicians have a huge incentive to fund unions, as unions return the love in campaign contributions. Sometimes this inures to the benefit of workers, such as cop unions getting laws protecting cops, or prison guard unions getting more people put in prison to assure no loss of jobs. Sometimes it’s just about unions protecting their own existence.
But what would happen if these efforts to circumvent forced union payments fails? Imagine:
Without forced contributions, unions will have to work harder to serve their members and give them value for their voluntary dues.
Sounds kind of…American.
— Scott Greenfield (@ScottGreenfield) June 27, 2018
Serving their members? Providing value for the money they suck out of public employees’ paychecks? This could bring about a paradigm shift in how unions and workers relate, no longer unions having grown from a group of employees banding together to have the collective power to negotiate on equal terms with their governmental employers, but independent monsters existing apart from employer and employee alike. Yet extracting fees from the unwilling for purposes they find anathema and “services” that fail to serve.
If public sector unions want to continue to exist, let them earn the willingness of workers to pay dues. Let them return to caring more about their members than their power to control politicians, go on ideological spending-sprees and gas up their union-given cars.
And should public sector unions cease to exist, become impoverished to the point that my old classmate, Randi Weingarten*, has to get a real job, it won’t be because Janus killed them, but because they committed suicide when they failed to serve workers and earn their loyalty, dedication and, yes, voluntary payment of dues. If workers don’t love unions enough to pay dues, then unions have no reason to exist. That’s on them.
*Randi is president of the American Federation of Teachers, for which she earns a salary of $543,150. There are a lot of third-grade teachers who don’t do nearly as well.
Copyright © 2007-2018 Simple Justice NY, LLC
This feed is for personal, non-commercial and Newstex use only.
The use of this feed anywhere else violates copyright. If this content is not in your news reader, it means the page you are viewing infringes copyright. (Digital Fingerprint:
51981395c77d7762065ca2c084b63e47)
No comments:
Post a Comment