Dues paid by millions of new members will fuel a massive increase in political spending by organized labor if the Employee Free Choice Act (aka Card Check) becomes law, according to the Workforce Fairness Institute (WFI).
Passage of Card Check, which abolishes secret ballots in union representation elections in the workplace and makes other reforms intended to help unions organize more workers, is Big Labor’s top legislative priority for 2009.
Only 12.4 percent of the nation’s workers are union members, according to government data, but union leaders like Andy Stern of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) project passage of Card Check would add 1.5 million new unionists annually for more than a decade.
Such an increase would hike union income by more than $637 million every year, and would enable unions to spend an additional $11.7 billion on partisan political activity, WFI said.
Union political spending includes direct contributions to candidates, employees taking paid leave to work for a candidate, and independent expenditures such as advertising and telephone banks. Stern’s SEIU spent an estimated $85 million in the 2008 campaign, WFI said.
Political action committees associated with labor and individuals employees of labor groups contributed $74.8 million to federal candidates during the 2008 election cycle, with 92% going to Democrats and 8% going to Republicans, according to OpenSecrets.org. The vast majority of this comes from labor PACS (more than $73 million).
WFI references a few older studies in its report that sample union dues to determine the average amount. A 2004 estimate that samples dues connected with the top 15 unions at that time finds that on average the dues amounted to $377, which would be $425 in today’s dollars. But it also noted in that same study that inclusion of retired members and nominal dues paying members probably lowered the average..
“At the very least, these samples suggest that the national average estimates are reasonable and potentially understate union dues receipts,” the WFI report states. “Therefore assuming membership growth of 1.5 million per year and the lower average dues estimate ($424), enactment of EFCA would increase union receipts by $637,500,000 per year.”
