If the Supreme Court rules in favor of Mark Janus and stops unions from collecting fees from unwilling government employees, public employee unions are expecting to lose a lot of revenues and a lot of dues-paying members as well.
After all, when there’s a substantial financial benefit to non-membership, it stands to reason that more workers will choose it.
The question, then, has been how the unions will handle the situation. They are preparing to have smaller budgets, but they’re also calling in all the favors they can. Democrats lean heavily on unions for their political muscle in most states. In California, especially, there’s no question that public-sector unions have been key to the party’s growing dominance there over the last 20 years.
So with the unions facing danger, how can their friends in state government help? Mike Antonucci of Intercepts highlights one bill being considered in Sacramento, written up this week in the Sacramento Bee. Its stated purpose is to prevent any disclosure of what is said to new hires during employee orientations. If that sounds weird, it gets weirder. The bill’s sponsor offers the bizarre explanation that somehow this will prevent workplace violence.
But based on the timing, this appears to be an attempt to prevent any legal process at the local or state level from making information available to new hires that they can ditch their union and stop paying dues. Unions have fought very hard, using both the courts and the political process, to keep workers in the dark in other, similar contexts where earlier Supreme Court decisions have exempted state employees from having to pay dues or remain union members. In a Washington state case involving home care workers, the SEIU did everything they could to make it illegal to tell union members that they had the option of quitting the union. When that failed, they had to adopt another scheme that they hope will let the union keep skimming from poor people’s state medical benefits.
The reason unions feel so certain they’ll lose the Janus case is that it all comes down to one new justice. A similar case testing the same union-friendly precedent split the high court 4-4 after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia but before the appointment of Justice Neil Gorsuch. They’re probably right.
