Posted on 04/03/2007 9:16:19 AM PDT by truth49
The Legislature is poised to pass a bill that circumvents a pending U.S. Supreme Court ruling, thwarts the will of the voters, and could subvert the First Amendment rights of teachers. Why?
As Washington State Senator Margarita Prentice said, “In union there’s strength, and there’s a reason why unions exist, and why they have [this] kind of power—and I think we need to do everything we can to preserve that.”
House Bill 2079 concerns the use of union dues for political activity. Workers in “agency shops” can be required to pay tribute for the union’s collective bargaining services. State law requires unions to get permission from nonmembers before using their payments for political activity. After all, no one should be forced to support political spending against his or her will.
The law has been the subject of prolonged litigation. The Office of the Attorney General prosecuted the Washington Education Association (WEA) for intentional violations of the law, and the case ended up before the U.S. Supreme Court, where Attorney General Rob McKenna presented arguments in January. Many experts predict the Court will uphold the law as a reasonable protection of the First Amendment rights of workers.
This expectation has galvanized Democrats in the state legislature, who have rushed to amend the law with HB 2079.
The bill presents several concerns. By amending the law before the Supreme Court rules on its constitutionality, lawmakers give the impression of attempting to mitigate a ruling against the union.
The legislation uses an accounting gimmick to gut the law of its effect. The bill says that nonmember fees are not used for political purposes if a union has sufficient revenue from other sources to fund its political spending. The practical effect is that unions will rarely, if ever, be required to seek authorization from nonmembers before using their payments for political activity.
The sponsors attached an “emergency clause” to the bill, which allows the legislation to take effect immediately and insulates it from a voters’ referendum. Preserving a union’s coerced political funding is hardly a state emergency, and voters deserve the opportunity to review the legislature’s amendment of the law.
The bill may also have constitutional flaws. The U.S. Supreme Court has rejected accounting gimmicks like the one proposed in HB 2079. Claiming that a union’s membership funds off-set the use of nonmember fees for politics is “of bookkeeping significance only rather than a matter of real substance,” said the Court in Abood v. Detroit Board of Education. This forces nonmembers to shoulder more than their fair share of collective bargaining costs.
The appropriate remedy embraced in landmark Supreme Court cases is to reduce the fees paid by nonmembers by the percentage of union expenditures that went toward objectionable purposes. If, for example, a teacher in Seattle pays $1,000 in dues, the WEA spends approximately 25 percent on non-bargaining activity. Thus, the teacher is entitled to a $250 reduction in dues.
Apparently this constitutional guidance is of little concern to lawmakers in Washington state who are beholden to Big Labor.
In fact, the Office of the Attorney General sent a letter to lawmakers warning the bill could be invalid by codifying a “constitutionally forbidden” practice. Senator Karen Keiser, the former communications director for the state AFL-CIO, chided the Attorney General’s Office at a public hearing for suggesting the bill may be unconstitutional. “I don’t really understand the purpose of injecting yourself into this hearing at this point, especially with a written letter.”
The House has already passed the bill and the Senate seems likely to follow. The question is whether Governor Gregoire will sign it. In her former role as attorney general she was responsible for bringing suit against the WEA for its admitted violations of the law. Will she now give unions a backdoor option to ignore the First Amendment rights of workers?
Michael Reitz is legal counsel and director of the Labor Policy Center. He came to EFF after working as a legal and legislative assistant with a non-profit organization in the Washington, D.C. area. Michael earned a juris doctorate from Oak Brook College of Law in Fresno, California. He is a member of the Washington and California Bars and is admitted to practice before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
labor unions are leading the political assault to overwhelm the individualistic traditions that made our nation great and to impose socialistic planning and regulation. labor unions are socialisms shock troops.
Ha! You had me going there for a second!
"Unions are for pu$$ies!"
If a union gets outside funds and spends those outside funds on political speech and that political speech is approved by the majority that seems to me to be within their rights.
That seems different than spending mandatory union dues on political speech. Maybe I’m missing something since this is the first article I’ve read on this recently.
It’s shuffling money. It’s like saying your taxes don’t pay for welfare, every other American’s does. Yours goes for defense. Personally, I think that if the union wants a closed shop, then they can’t pay a dime of their own money on any political activity and have to set up a PAC with non-dues funds.
Of course, if they are in an open shop, I think that the members can be forced to have their dues go to the political activities of the union. But that isn’t the current law.
No, unions are for the bottom 50% of pu$$ies. Even a pu$$y avoids a union if he is a performer.
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