Good News on Labor Day

Good News on Labor Day

– By Howard Sierer –

A union’s “customers” are its members, its only reason for existing, and whose dues are the union’s primary source of income. Just as Bud Light and Target learned the hard way, when leaders of any large organization spend its funds supporting controversial and divisive political and social movements, a significant portion of its customers choose to go elsewhere.

Government employees were given the freedom to “go elsewhere” – in this case, to stop paying previously mandatory union dues – thanks to the Supreme Court’s 2018 Janus decision. As a result, government union dues income is shrinking.

Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s letter to the Federation of Federal Employees explained that government employee unions were fundamentally different than private unions. Roosevelt feared government employees unions would use their incestuous relationship with government officials to the public’s detriment.

How? By negotiating sweetheart “closed shop” contracts with many state and local governments that required all their employees to pay union dues whether or not they had actually joined the union.

Union leaders used these confiscated funds to contribute to the election campaigns of candidates who supported the union, becoming the largest contributor by far to many campaigns. This incestuous process resulted in government officials elected with union money sitting across the bargaining table discussing wages with the very union leaders who’d got them elected. See a conflict there? Roosevelt did.

With dues money rolling in, government union leaders chose to contribute to progressive causes that were not closely related to members’ wages and working conditions, causes like Black Lives Matter, the National Abortion Rights Action League, and various climate change activist groups.

This racket ran afoul of the Constitution. Illinois state employee Mark Janus sued the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, claiming that his mandatory dues were being used to fund causes that he did not support, a violation of his First Amendment rights.

To the country’s benefit, the Supreme Court limited public employee unions’ stranglehold with its Janus decision. The ruling applied to the 22 states that did not have “right to work“ laws which prohibit mandatory union membership. (Utah is a right-to-work state; Illinois is not.) Mark Janus stopped paying union dues, and over a million other government employees around the country have joined him, objecting to what unions were doing with their dues.

It’s been five years since the Janus decision, and government employee unions are putting up a brave front, claiming little impact on their membership numbers. These “whistling in the dark” claims are possible because federal law requiring disclosure of membership totals and revenue sources doesn’t apply to most public sector unions.

To overcome this lack of federal data, the Mackinac Center for Public Policy sent freedom-of-information (FOIA) requests to more than 600 state and local government employers in the 22 states affected by Janus. By looking at payroll data, it calculated the number of public sector workers covered by union contracts who weren’t paying union dues.

As a result, the Center estimates that 22.2% of public sector workers  have opted out of membership since 2017. That means that nearly 1.2 million people have chosen not to be represented by government unions. Before the Janus decision, they didn’t have the freedom to make that choice: clearly, huge numbers of public sector workers wanted out.

The union decline is especially apparent in a few key states. In California, nearly 30% of public workers – almost 200,000 in total – have opted out of government unions. In Colorado, the number is over 50%, and in New Mexico, it’s over 60%. The number of teachers union members in Florida had decreased by at least 4,500 through 2020-21.

In the past, I’ve been hard on teachers unions while praising individual teachers’ commitment to kids. The National Education Association, the umbrella group for many state and local teachers unions, makes clear why I and many others oppose its embrace of divisive progressive political causes that have little to do with teachers’ wages and contracts.

The NEA’s website says, “When we expand the continuum of bargaining, we build power and go on the offense in order to fight for social and racial justice, for our kids, for our schools, for our communities, and for the future.”

Teachers unions used to focus on compensation and tenure, but to the NEA, “expanding the continuum of bargaining” means supporting and donating to a broad spectrum of progressive political causes, almost all of them contentious, divisive, and hence unrepresentative of many of its members.

Putting the NEA’s principle into practice, last May, the Oakland teachers union kept 35,000 students out of school with three weeks left in the school year. Its demands: climate justice and homeless housing.

The union also wanted the first week of school each year to focus on creating a “positive school culture,” whatever that means, rather than instruction. In addition, it demanded a “Climate Justice Day for standards-based teach-ins, workshops, action, and field trips.”

Even Oakland’s NAACP branch urged teachers to get back to work: “Education is critical to ending intergenerational poverty.” Political indoctrination is not education.

We can only hope that in five more years, the 10th anniversary of the Janus decision, government unions will admit how much they’re hurting and become less partisan by representing the real interests of their membership.