The Supreme Court recently decided an important 1st Amendment case involving unions (spit SEIU...) Knox v. SEIU seems like a simple case to me. In the middle of the year SEIU established a political advocacy fund to defeat Prop 75 in California, which would have prevented non-union state workers from having dues extracted without consent specifically to pay for the political advocacy of the unions. This fund was paid for by extracting fees from non-union members, in order to defeat a ballot initiative that would have directly benefited those non-union members.
So essentially, the Union position was that it should be able to extract fees from non-union members in order to engage in political advocacy which would directly restrict the rights of those members the fees were being extracted from. How is that NOT a clear violation of the 1st Amendment rights of those members?
Via Thinkprogress, with the crazy leftist view. Note that they're complaining about unions having to get the consent of non-members in order to increase their dues. That's one thing I cannot stand about Unions and leftists. They think it perfectly fine, and in fact an important feature of unions that they should be able to take money from people without their specific consent.
My biggest question here was how in the hell the unions were able to take dues from non-union public employees in the first place, well Redstate answered that question, and I quote,
In California, public workers are not required to join a union. Those that do not are assessed a “fair share fee,” usually a payroll deduction remitted to the union for representing their interests in certain areas. The fee assessed is a percentage of the amount charged a union member.
So in CA, if you work for the government and choose not to join a union you STILL have a "fair share fee" deducted from your pay and given to the unions?! Boy, this sure is emblematic of why I dislike unions and the forced compulsion / lack of free choice inherent in contemporary liberalism.
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2 comments:
While I agree, there is more here than meets the eye. Public unions are required to represent all employees, union or not.
For example, a non union employee gets in trouble, the union is legally obligated to defend them. This makes it possible for less than honest employees to not pay dues while still obligating the union to represent them as if they were.
In this case, I think that changing the law to let the union hang those non dues paying members out to dry would be the fair way to do it: if you don't pay for the service, you shouldn't have access to that service.
I agree with Divemedic. The solution is to release unions from representing non-union members.
Of course, that won't happen because the unions don't want to give up the money they charge for that "service" (which I would imagine is pretty rarely used).
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