Supreme Court Halts One Kind Of Labor Extortion
First Amendment: In a 7-to-2 decision, the Supreme Court has ruled that public-sector unions violate the Constitution when they force nonmembers to finance their ideological activities. Big Labor's bullies lose again.
June continues to be a bad month for Barack Obama, but it may be the worst month ever for the Labor Mob, whose longtime sources of power are running head-on into the electorate and the Constitution.
Big Labor spent a bundle and poured its manpower into removing a governor who dared to treat collective bargaining as a privilege, not a right. But earlier this month it lost, as Wisconsin's Scott Walker became the first state governor in U.S. history to win a recall election.
On Thursday came possibly an even bigger blow, from seven justices of the Supreme Court in a huge loss for the Service Employees International Union.
In ruling that workers who choose not to be union members must be able to object immediately to unexpected fee increases or similar levies required of all employees in closed shops, the high court touched a nerve in the conflict between Big Labor and the right-to-work movement.
Unions have been allowed to collect money from nonmembers to prevent them "from free-riding on the union's efforts, sharing the employment benefits obtained by the union's collective bargaining without sharing the costs incurred," as the court stated in its unanimous 2007 Davenport ruling.
But as Justice Antonin Scalia stated in that case, "agency-shop arrangements in the public sector raise First Amendment concerns because they force individuals to contribute money to unions as a condition of government employment."
In Thursday's ruling, the court called its acceptance of the free-rider argument "an anomaly" and had this to say about the SEIU's "opt-out" system placing the burden on the nonmember rather than the union: "This aggressive use of power by the SEIU to collect fees from nonmembers is indefensible."
The union's gall in this specific case in underlined by the fact that it was taking money from nonmembers to defeat, in 2005, California's Proposition 75, which would have prohibited the SEIU from using dues or fees for political contributions without employees' written consent.
"Thus, the effect of the SEIU's procedure was to force many nonmembers to subsidize a political effort designed to restrict their own rights," Justice Samuel Alito noted.
The SEIU even had the nerve to argue that nonmembers would have gotten their money back eventually anyway — to which the court tartly responded: "the First Amendment does not permit a union to extract a loan from unwilling nonmembers even if the money is later paid back in full."
And how about the SEIU area manager who responded to a complaint about improper political use of nonmember funds with the excuse that "we are in the fight of our lives"?
Big Labor's well-funded bullies do indeed seem to be in the fight of their lives — because more Americans are getting wise to their heavy-handed, often illegal methods, in this case compelling the funding of the speech of others, a grievous First Amendment violation. |
