TEHRAN, July 02 - The Supreme Court decision striking down mandatory union fees for government workers was not only a blow to unions. It will also hit hard at a vast network of groups dedicated to advancing liberal policies and candidates.
TEHRAN, Young Journalists Club (YJC) -The Supreme Court decision striking down mandatory union fees for government workers was not only a blow to unions. It will also hit hard at a vast network of groups dedicated to advancing liberal policies and candidates.
Some of these groups work for immigrants and civil rights; others produce economic research; still others turn out voters or run ads in Democratic campaigns. Together, they have benefited from tens of millions of dollars a year from public-sector unions — funding now in jeopardy because of the prospective decline in union revenue.
Liberal activists argue that closing that pipeline was a crucial goal of the conservative groups that helped bring the case, known as Janus v. American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.
“If the progressive movement is a navy, they’re trying to take out our aircraft carriers,” said Ben Wikler, Washington director of the liberal activist group MoveOn.org.
Conservatives have acknowledged as much. In a fund-raising solicitation in December, John Tillman, the chief executive of the free-market group that found the plaintiff in the case, cited the objective of depriving unions of revenue by helping workers abandon them. “The union bosses would use that money to advance their big-government agenda,” Mr. Tillman wrote.
Even President Trump took notice of the justices’ ruling, declaring on Twitter that it was a “big loss for the coffers of the Democrats!”
In the 5-to-4 decision on Wednesday, the court’s majority ruled that requiring nonmembers to make union payments violated their First Amendment rights, since much of what unions do could be considered political activity at odds with their beliefs.
The unions’ ability to spend on progressive causes and candidates was already diminishing.
As conservative groups escalated their campaign to rein in labor over the past decade or two, unions have had to divert more and more of their budgets to defensive battles, leaving less to spend elsewhere. But the multipronged effort that culminated in the Janus decision — whose likely effect will be a loss of at least hundreds of thousands of members and tens of millions in revenue — has forced many public unions, among the most powerful in the labor movement, to fundamentally rethink their spending.
Source: nytimes
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