Last week, a mob of protesters descended on Washington, D.C., in the name of climate change. They carried signs and blocked some of the city’s busiest intersections to draw attention to their environmental demands — leaving in their wake, by the way, a mountain of water bottles, fast-food takeout bags, and other waste for National Park Service crews to clean up.
So much for their commitment to Mother Earth.
Meanwhile, a protest just as unserious, and every bit as instructive about the true aims of the political Left, was taking place on the country’s other coast, albeit to much less media fawning.
Hundreds of angry demonstrators — many paid to attend and bused to the event by organized labor — staked themselves on the sidewalk in Bellevue, Washingotn, protesting the annual banquet of the Freedom Foundation, a right-of-center think tank with offices in Washington, Oregon, and California.
Their beef? A pair of U.S. Supreme Court rulings had declared that it is unconstitutional and illegal to force government employees to financially support unions through member dues or fees. Government unions on the West Coast are hemorrhaging members as a result. And labor leaders blame the Freedom Foundation for helping government employees learn about and execute their right to stop paying these unions, information the unions themselves would have shared if they saw their members as anything other than paychecks waiting to be plundered.
In 2014, the unions’ grip on the paychecks of public employees first began to loosen when the Supreme Court ruled in Harris v. Quinn that publicly compensated child care and home care providers could not be forced to join a union or pay dues against their will. That decision set the stage for the court’s June 2018 decision in Janus v. AFSCME, declaring that forced dues (or their equally odious substitute, so-called agency fees) violate the First Amendment rights of all government employees.
Not surprisingly, both cases were a body blow to organized labor and its paid-for allies on the political Left. While union membership in the private sector has plummeted to record lows in recent years, the movement had been propped up by inflated numbers in the public sector, where government continues to grow uncontrolled and add thousands of new workers to the payroll every year.
And until very recently, every single one was required in one way or another to support a designated union, even when that meant financing political candidates and causes that violated their core principles.
The Center for Union Facts found that between 2010 and 2018, unions across the board gave well over $1 billion to Democrats and liberal groups who, in turn, passed legislation strengthening unions and insulating them from the laws the rest of us must follow.
Is it any wonder hardworking Americans don’t want money taken from their paychecks to fund unions’ political hobby horses?
Since the Janus ruling, public employees on the West Coast have been abandoning government unions in droves; the Freedom Foundation has directly helped 60,000 of these workers. This mass exodus has returned more than $50 million back into the pockets of those who actually earned it, while simultaneously denying unions the ability to finance their political agenda with someone else’s money.
While the world watches the climate activists on the East Coast, know that the West Coast has its own battle, and the Left is losing.
Labor leaders are terrified of the losses they are experiencing, because fewer union members mean fewer dollars in their coffers. Consequently, they are furious at the organizations and activists they blame for the change.
But the real culprit is the one they see in the mirror every morning.
Ashley Varner is vice president for communications of the Freedom Foundation, a West Coast-based, nonpartisan policy organization advocating free markets and limited, accountable government.
