Two big backward steps on unions

Because the court lacked Scalia’s vote, state and local governments elected with union money and union backing can continue to give unions a sweetheart deal at the expense of unwilling workers. They can let unions compel financial contributions from government workers who just want to do their jobs and would rather have no part of a union.

This high-profile victory for the labor bosses preserves an unjust status quo. But there was also another, less-noticed victory for Big Labor last week — a naked, egregious and disgraceful attempt by President Obama to tilt the playing field to benefit one of his most important political benefactors.

The Obama Labor Department is using a new rule change to intimidate attorneys out of advising businesses when they are targeted for unionization. The so-called “persuader rule” would make attorneys who advise companies during union drives divulge all kinds of privileged and confidential information about whom they retain as clients, how much they’re paid and what kind of advice they offer.

This new rule clearly violates attorney-client privilege, which is one reason the American Bar Association strongly opposes it. One can imagine that Obama, once a practicing attorney himself, might have swallowed hard as he chose to help the unions at the expense of his former profession.

Unions, long frustrated by employers who used lawful means to resist unionization, argue bogusly that this rule levels the playing field. After all, as AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka says, unions must file a great deal of paperwork that discloses their operations.

But there is a good reason why unions must do so and private attorneys, at least until now, have not had to. Labor unions collect hundreds of millions of dollars in involuntary dues and fees from workers each year. In some cases, they are granted the unusual privilege of being able to take the money out of workers’ paychecks before it even reaches the earner. Thus they owe their members and the public a complete accounting for how they use it.

Corporations, by contrast, are private institutions owned by their shareholders. No one is obliged to invest in their stock the way workers are forced to pay union dues and the public is forced via taxes to finance government operations. It is therefore proper that the private association of corporate owners should decide their rules of disclosure for themselves, without interference from anyone, least of all Washington.

The law covering union disclosure was created specifically to combat widespread labor corruption. If corporate boards are thought corrupt, their shareholders can throw them out and change the rules as they choose. It’s no one else’s business.

Labor unions are in decline because they are less relevant to workers than at any time since federal law granted them monopoly privileges 80 years ago. Yet the Obama administration, whose existence was made possible by the strong political and financial support of organized labor, continues looking for new top-down ways to keep the union bosses’ gravy train running. It is ironic that many Democrats talk of themselves as “progressive” while the policies they support and their White House champion are so backward-looking.

In this context, it comes as no surprise that four states with long histories of unionism and manufacturing (Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and West Virginia) have adopted right-to-work laws during the Obama era. Right-to-work does not cancel federal law, but it makes the privileges that unions enjoy much less of a drag on businesses, and it lets states circumvent much of Obama’s labor policy.

Still, state laws here and there are not the long-term solution. The Depression-era laws that govern unionization need to be overhauled, so workers’ rights to their own pay and their own destiny are given higher priority than labor bosses’ feudal privileges.