Unions are in anguish over the Supreme Court’s Janus decision Wednesday that affirms public employees’ First Amendment right not to pay union dues. The Supreme Court’s Janus ruling doesn’t just grant workers freedom — there’s every reason to expect workers will exercise that freedom by choosing not to support public sector unions.
As of 2009, public sector union members outnumbered private sector for union workers for the first time, and unlike private sector unions, the number of public sector union workers has actually been growing. That was actually something of a political liability. Republicans increasingly harped on the use of taxpayer-funded mandatory union fees to lobby for higher public-sector union pay and benefits when compensation was already generous relative to the private sector average. (This is also why, once upon a time, Democrats such as FDR and the former head of the AFL-CIO opposed the creation of public unions, which largely took off in the 1950s.) Further, public unions were some of the biggest, and in the case of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), often the biggest spenders in recent election cycles.
That public sector unions could be so profligate and influential was a luxury afforded only by the compulsory collection of union dues. In recent years, there have been a number of times where public employees were no longer compelled to pay union dues, and every time they were given the option, they opted out of supporting their unions in droves.
Overall union membership in Wisconsin is down 40 percent since Governor Scott Walker’s heavily protested union reforms, and it’s blown a big hole in the budget of Wisconsin’s AFSCME chapters, which lost two out of three dues paying members. And in 2012, George Will noted that the situation is even more dire for unions in other states that have, to varying degrees, stopped enforcing mandatory union dues:
And in 1992, Washington state required the state National Education Association affiliate to get written approval from teachers before their dues could be used to fund the union’s PAC, the number of teachers funding the PAC “plunged from 49,000 to 11,000 in just a year. Its annual receipts fell from roughly $588,000 to $132,000.”
If unionism were such an overwhelming positive for public employees who, unlike private sector union members, have always had civil service protections and relatively good compensation, unions wouldn’t have to worry about today’s ruling. Instead, you’re going to hear a lot of shrieking about how bad this is for workers, when the workers themselves have been saying otherwise for sometime. The entity that really suffers from today’s ruling is the Democratic party, which complains about money in politics incessantly, and yet takes billions in opaquely sourced union money from workers and taxpayers that demonstrably don’t want to give it to them.
