Last week, the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Davenport v. Washington Education Association, a case that involved a state law in Washington that attempted to protect workers who are required to pay union dues but do not want union officials to spend any of their money on politics. The Court unanimously upheld the Washington statute, overruling a preposterous decision by the Supreme Court of Washington that such a law interfered with the First Amendment rights of the union officials.
Commenting here on the decision, attorney James Bopp finds that statutes such as Washington’s (Paycheck Protection Acts, or PPAs) are not adequate to deal with the problem of union coercion. He’s absolutely right. Unions are unstoppable in their efforts to squeeze as much money as possible out of the people they “represent” and have proven to be quite capable of using novel definitions and creative accounting in order to appear to be complying with PPAs, but still going about business as usual. Bopp argues that states need to focus on assuring voluntarism.
The states can’t do anything about the repugnant federal law that controls in this field, the National Labor Relations Act. That law, which applies to private sector employees, contains the highly authoritarian provision that if a majority of workers favor a union, then all the workers must accept representation by (and pay dues or “agency fees”) to the union, even if they don’t want the union’s representation and would rather deal on their own. It’s too bad that the Supreme Court, so fond of finding “fundamental rights” in the Constitution, has never ruled that the right to negotiate for yourself over a matter as important as one’s employment is a right worth protecting at all.
When it comes to public sector employment, each state can make its own law. As Bopp writes, the states ought to concern themselves with ensuring that the relationship between workers and unions is voluntary. The sad fact is that many politicians are perfectly content to curry favor with union officials (who can and do provide ample campaign support) by trampling over the rights of government employees and compelling them to pay union dues.
Unions talk about protecting the rights of workers, but that doesn’t extend to the right to choose to have nothing to do with them.
