Posted on 01/10/2016 4:43:45 PM PST by willowsdale
In an op-ed published this week regarding a landmark legal case about to be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court, Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California, Irvine School of Law and part-time pundit, gets one important thing right.
As Chemerinsky says, the High Courtâs 1977 decision in Abood v. Detroit Board of Education â the precedent that is being challenged in the case at hand â is âbasedâ on the âsimple . . . premiseâ that employees who are subject to âexclusiveâ union bargaining, but choose not to be members, âbenefit . . . from the union in their wages [and] their working conditions . . . .â
Justice Potter Stewart, the author of Abood, and the justices who joined with him did indeed rely on this bare assumption to justify upholding the constitutionality of state laws that force public employees who wish not to join a union to pay union fees, or be fired, even though such laws admittedly âinterfereâ with the First Amendment rights of dissenting employees.
Where Chemerinsky goes wrong is in claiming that this âunion nonmembers benefitâ premise is âundeniably correct.â Far from being âundeniably correct,â this premise is now utterly discredited. So discredited, in fact, that even one of the pro-forced unionism respondents in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association (CTA), the challenge to Abood that will be orally argued before the High Court on Monday, has explicitly admitted it isnât true.
In a brief she submitted to the Supreme Court last November, California Attorney General Kamala Harris, who along with officials of the National Education Association (NEA) union-affiliated CTA is defending the constitutionality of compulsory fees for union nonmembers, felt she had no choice but to admit:
Unions do have substantial latitude to advance bargaining positions that . . . run counter to the economic interests of some employees.
This is an implicit acknowledgement of the fact that, in government-sector forced-unionism states like California, public servants who wish to keep their jobs must pay union officials to advocate policies that affirmatively harm the unionized employees.
Harris went on to argue that there is nothing constitutionally suspect or untoward about state laws forcing government employees to bankroll a union that is harming them even as it advances its own institutional interests, as long as union bosses conduct themselves in what she characterizes as a ârationalâ manner.
This was how she opted to address the point, made by the plaintiffs in a brief a couple of months earlier, that the official NEA handbook itself explicitly states that the union hierarchy considers âany system of compensation based on an evaluation of an education employeeâs performanceâ to be âinappropriateâ and also âopposes providing additional compensation to attract and/or retain education employees in hard-to-recruit positions.â
Harrisâs attempt to justify forced union dues for harmful ârepresentationâ may not ultimately convince a Supreme Court majority to uphold Aboodâs result, but it at least has the merit of acknowledging an important, albeit inconvenient fact.
Unfortunately, Chemerinsky and other Big Labor pundits from inside and outside the legal community are opting against candor. Ignoring the irrefutable evidence from the NEA handbook cited by the plaintiffs and the blunt words of the union-label California attorney general, he and a wide array of commentators of his ilk continue to claim, in addressing the Friedrichs case, that all public employees subject to monopoly unionism âbenefitâ thereby.
As we have just seen, this simply isnât true, and there is little hope for Big Labor at this point that five Supreme Court justices will even agree to pretend its true.
Itâs time for Chemerinsky et al to ask themselves, if Kamala Harris can handle the truth about the impact of union monopoly bargaining on employees who donât want a union, then shouldnât we be able to handle it, too?
Obama wanted this guy on the USSC.
I was a forced victim of this immoral law.
Party A (teacher’s union) colludes with Party B (School Board) to pick the pocket of Party C (teacher) for whatever amount A decides they want.
Thomas Jefferson wrote about how immoral this action is, in principle.
Thomas Souter wrote in his opinion, that the reason it was constitutional was for.....get this....”Labor peace”.
What a treasonous piece of work he was.
I was in the Teamsters working at UPS. The guy next to me topped out at $15.50 an hour. I got $13.50 max. (This was in the 1980s)
UPS wanted to invest in air freight to compete with Federal Express. The best way to do it would be to reduce payroll. The existing employees signed a new contract that let them keep their old wage scale and chopped the pay for everyone hired after them. Each of them got an extra month’s pay for that trick.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.