Landmark Defends Public Sector Workers in U.S. Supreme Court

Today, Landmark Legal Foundation filed a friend of the court brief with the Supreme Court in Belgau v. Inslee. In this case, public-sector workers sued Washington Governor Jay Inslee and their union, AFSCME Council 28, the Washington Federation of State Employees (WFSE), over the deduction of union dues from their paychecks. This case is one of many arising from steps taken by public-sector unions to avoid the restrictions from a groundbreaking Supreme Court case in 2018, Janus v. AFSCME, Council 31.

In Janus, the Supreme Court overruled forty-year-old precedent to protect workers’ First Amendment rights. No longer would nonunion members be forced to pay any fees to unions unless they provided consent. In anticipation of Janus, many unions revised their payroll deduction authorizations with their union members so that even if the members later decided to leave the union, they would be contractually obligated to pay the full amount of union dues until a narrow escape period at the end of the contract.

Landmark urges the Court to accept the case and protect workers from being forced to support a union. Landmark's brief is here:

https://fb6603af-2803-4193-8547-4092b8934993.usrfiles.com/ugd/fb6603_043e9e35980b465ea0d7e38b85551322.pdf

I still remember my first “real” job when I graduated from high school. I went to work for Martin Marietta (Denver Aerospace division), working in an electronics lab. As they were giving me the tour of the facility after I interviewed, they happened to mention that they had a “closed shop”, and that union dues would be deducted from my pay. I was caught off guard and confused. I’d never heard of that term before, nor of the concept of mandatory deduction of union dues.

I asked, “What if I don’t want to join the union?”, to which they responded, “Doesn’t matter, the dues will still be deducted.” I was just stunned that such a thing was legal.

After that, I got a great education in the folly of unions. We were members of the UAW, which also surprised me because we weren’t building cars. We were working on projects like the space shuttle, the MX missile, the Galileo Jupiter probe, reconnaissance satellites, etc.

I quickly learned how useless these unions are, both to their members and to the efficiency of getting work done. Any electronic component that simply needed to be moved from one room to another couldn’t just be carried there by the person working on it. No, instead we had to get a union “expediter” (what an oxymoron) to move it for us, and then move it back again. These expediters had no other function, and they didn’t appear to have any special training, nor did they do anything different than we would have if we moved things ourselves. It also often took hours to find one when you needed them. It didn’t take long for me to realize that these were just “make work” jobs that the union had created to pad the number of union members.

And the union stewards were even worse. I never saw them do much if any actual work, instead spending all of their time dreaming up imaginary issues, and filing grievances over them. They performed no real function, but were given wide latitude by the company, presumably to maintain peace with the union.

The ultimate absurdity of it all was that Martin Marietta was a fantastic place to work, with an endless array of company-provided perks. Employees were treated and paid very well, and I don’t think that the idiotic union had a thing to do with it.

One last story: As the defense industry, especially at that time (early ‘80s), was a boom or bust industry, it was common to work massive overtime while they had contracts going and then to be laid off if a contract ended without an immediate replacement. So while we had work, it was common for lower seniority employees to be assigned mandatory overtime, and for higher seniority employees to be asked to volunteer for overtime. One time, we found out that a group of high-seniority women had sat back and watched lower seniority employees be asked to work overtime for something like a year or two, only to eventually spring a trap on the company by filing a grievance and claiming that they should have been asked to work instead of the low seniority employees. Now, it was well-known that these women didn’t really want to work overtime because previously they had always turned it down, and they certainly wouldn’t have accepted if asked this time either. However, they prevailed and the company ended up paying them triple pay for all of that time, when they never worked a minute of overtime and never intended to.

I’ve seen everything I need to know about unions.

“...and filing grievances over them.”

I used to do a lot of work at one government site and used a locker room of theirs for potty trips and changing clothing. There was a sink being replaced. A week in the box, two weeks out of the box, three weeks partly installed, etc.

I commented to my contact about how it must be union work.

He said all of the workers are union. And as their boss, he can’t yell at them if they don’t get their work done or they will file a grievance.

He was at one meeting as another boss was pleading with the workers under his employment. “So guys, we are way late on the project and WAY over budget if we keep going like this. So please, if we could all just put in 4 hours of good solid work each day we can get back on track and make the budget. PLEASE!” The workers just grumbled.

(They worked four 10-hour days!)

Yep, I've worked with unions quite a bit. I was white collar so not a union member. OCAW, UAW, Steel Workers and building trades.

My first time with this was in the petrochemical industry a couple of years out of college. I was in R&D and our organization was 100% salaried, nonunion and about 800 personnel at the complex out of about 10,000 total employees. Big place.

The OCAW contract was in negotiations and the company believed the union was likely to strike as they had done when the previous contract expired. As the company had done in the previous strike, they would again slam the total R&D staff into production units to replace about 5000 strikers to keep product running. I had the uncomfortable experience of being trained in outside operator duties by the person I would replace.

When the OCAW went on strike previously, the R&D folks were given unlimited $$$ to keep things running so they modernized controls, rewrote procedures and automated production labs. When the strike ended, many union jobs had been modernized out of existence. The union in this case found common ground with the company so no strike took place.

I've got no beef with the OCAW and they have been a great partner for driving safety in what is a hazardous work place. Thing can go boom if you screw up. In my personal experiences, I think they evolved out of the feather bedding of unnecessary workers.

I've worked with UAW folks several times but only once of any substance. A SUV factory had a Legionella outbreak and the plant 100% shutdown to find and fix the problem. The shutdown was costing the company $1MM a day in lost profit. BTW, I am a chemical engineer and microbiologist.

So, the local factory management reached out to my company to assist in fixing things and the corporate office reached out to a competitor company. My company kicked the problem to our corporate office scientists as did the competitor. These two groups both came up with grand schemes that would take weeks to mobilize, were complex and take weeks onsite. I put together a separate plan to address this that was less complex, a fraction of the cost and could begin in 36 hours after getting the go ahead. I got the job and went to work.

The UAW part of this... I had a chemical dosing system set up to hyperchlorinate the water system to sterilize it. Several of our work teams fanned into the facility to do their tasks and I was running a chemical dosing system into the main waterline. I had been doing my work and along walks up a UAW worker and told me I needed a pipefitter teamed with me. Remember, this facility was shutdown and virtually deserted. I told him no thank you and offered him a donut as our break area was close by. He again said I needed a pipefitter so I started using big words describing what I was doing and there was not anything that a pipefitter could do to assist. His response was to say I needed a pipefitter then walked off.

Weird encounter. I called the facility maintenance manager and told him the pipe fitter stuff. He got pissed off and told me the guy was the union steward and when he went off that duty in a few days, the manager was going to assign the guy every crappy job he could find. However, my crews and myself had to drop everything until the next day, which cost the company another $1MM. The manager got a union grievance file on him and I am sure retaliated in his own way.

Fast forward a couple of months and I was doing the last task we had on this project. My work had limited the plant shutdown to a few days and we had implemented some band-aids to prevent a reoccurrence. The permanent fix took a few months to implement and provide detail needed for long term sustainment. I needed to walk the entire facility one more time to verify piping drawings. It would take 2 persons several days to do it or 1 person 1 day if the plant was not operating. The UAW contract shut the whole plant down on state voting days so the union folks could get out their vole unhindered. I knew the place was deserted so wouldn't need to worried about moving machinery and forklifts

Going in at Security, I crossed paths with a worker also going in and we said good morning, nice weather today kind of small talk for a few moments. A big guy walked up and started berating the guy I was speaking with about being at the plant instead of voting. The big guy stopped midrant and focused on me and asked who was, what was I doing there. I told him and he switched to very cordial and told me to be safe today and do what I needed to. I went in, called the maintenance manager and did my work. Never heard any more of it.

Building trades... I worked as a construction manager from time to time and from my somewhat limited experience with trades unions, it was not a hindrance my work. Well, except the electricians. Lol. Because of break rules, I got about 6 hours a day out of them per 8 hour workday. Quality of work was excellent.

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