It's public information if you want to look it up. Go ahead. Search for the donor records of just about any Democrat candidate for any significant office. What you'll find is that the list is heavily populated with labor unions, many of them representing public employees.
This has long been considered a racket, and for good reason. Democrats pass laws that compel workers to join unions and pay them dues whether the workers want to or not, and then the unions turn around and contribute substantial amounts of the money collected back to Democrat candidates to support their campaigns, even though some percentage of the workers paying the dues may not support the Democrat candidates and don't want their money going to support them.
Too bad. If it's a union shop, you gotta join the union. If you join the union, you gotta pay dues. And if you pay dues, you have no say in whether the union uses the money to support political candidates, even if you oppose those candidates.
It's good to be king, eh?
It's astonishing to think that this is allowed to go on, but it does for several reasons:
When Democrats have power, they do what they want.
When Republicans have power, they are terrified of being portrayed as "anti-worker" by going against the union agenda.
The media are largely pro-union so they don't shine a light on the rottenness of the practice.
But even with all that, how is this even legal? Isn't it a violation of the constitutional rights of workers to be forced to give their money for the benefit of political candidates they don't support? You'd think so, but since the last decisive case on this in 1977, no Supreme Court majority has been cobbled together to restore the rights of workers vis-a-vis their union overlords. It almost happened last year, but Antonin Scalia's death the conservative wing of the court one vote short of a majority, and case that could have changed this precedent ended up in a 4-4 stalemate.
But now Neil Gorsuch's elevation to SCOTUS has restored the conservative majority, and the unions are sweating an upcoming case that could spell disaster for them:
As for the law, the Justices agreed Thursday to hear Janus v. Afscme, which could become a landmark case on coerced political speech and the First Amendment.
The case gives the Court another chance to atone for its mistaken 1977 ruling in Abood v. Detroit Board of Education that government can force employees to pay dues that unions spend on causes the employees might not support. Abood justified this on grounds that union “agency fees” financed collective bargaining, not political activities. This ignored that collective bargaining by public unions is inherently political since it involves issues like pensions, public services and the level of taxation. Advocacy about these issues is core protected speech under the First Amendment.
Agency-fee money is fungible, and it’s clear by now that unions also fund any political activity you can imagine—from Clinton for President, to advocating for a higher minimum wage, immigration reform, legal marijuana and even Supreme Court nominations. This violates what the Court said in 2014 (Harris v. Quinn ) is a “bedrock principle” that “no person in this country may be compelled to subsidize speech by a third party that he or she does not wish to support.”
The High Court has been gradually rolling back Abood in recent years, and it looked poised to go all the way in 2016 in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, a case brought by 10 public school teachers. But Justice Antonin Scalia’s death led to a one-sentence 4-4 decision “by an equally divided Court.” Janus offers a second chance, and Justice Gorsuch is likely to tip the majority in favor of free speech if his First Amendment jurisprudence on lower courts is any guide.
The stakes for unions are enormous. Earlier this month the Center for Union Facts reported that private and public unions together gave nearly $765 million to Democrats and liberal groups between 2012 and 2016. Afscme polled its members amid a wave of state right-to-work conversions, concluding in 2015 that if they had a choice about whether or not to give their money to the union, 15% would opt out, while half would be “on the fence.” A ruling in favor of free speech in Janus could extend that option to at least five million government employees.
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All you have to do is run the numbers to see what a disaster this case could be for both unions and the Democratic Party. If AFSCME is typical, then we're looking at upwards of 40 percent of union members who would opt out of paying union dues if they had the choice. Assuming the unions reduced their political contributions accordingly, Democrats would stand to lose somthing on the order of $300 million from their biggest benefactors.
But they might lose even more than that. If you suddenly lost 40 percent of your revenue because people could now choose not to give you money, and one of the reasons they chose not to do so was your political giving, wouldn't you rethink that giving entirely? This would be a tough pill for unions to swallow because much of their influence has always depended on union-friendly laws like the one in question in the Janus case. Stop giving money to Democrats and it becomes a lot harder to compel people to join your ranks and pay dues.
Then again, what good is it to elect Democrats if the laws they would pass on behalf of unions are now established as unconstitutional? Unions might be forced to adapt to the new reality by actually focusing on the needs and concerns of their members.
But I foresee a problem with that too. Many a union honcho is steeped in the thinking that company management is a sworn enemy devoted to sucking the lifeblood out of workers. That is almost never the case, but union leaders think it is and the way they deal with it is usually to proceed as if they are in a state of all-out war with company management. This is the kind of nonsense that nearly brought General Motors and Chrysler to their knees, and has scared away workers at southern auto plants who wanted nothing to do with the United Auto Workers when given a chance to vote on joining.
What unions ought to do is put politics on the back burner and focus on truly representing the interests of their workers - not as adveraries of the company but as advocates looking to give workers the best shot at a good reward while everyone works together for the company's success.
And if Janus goes the way it appears it might go, they may have no choice but to try this very tact.
