Citizens for Limited Taxation & Government
"The Commonwealth Activist Network"
18 Tremont Street #608 * Boston, MA 02108
Phone:(617) 248-0022 * E-Mail: cltg@cltg.org
Visit our web-page at: http://cltg.org
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*** CLT&G Update ***
Friday, May 15, 1998
"Paycheck Protection"—A Better Way!
Greetings activists and supporters;
In response to yesterday’s CLT&G Update on the California "Paycheck Protection" initiative, I received the following message from Jeff Jacoby, columnist for the Boston Globe, and think you’ll find it of interest. Jeff, who’s forced to belong to the union at the Globe, has been battling it from the beginning.
Somehow I’d missed his column on the topic last week—and I always look for them on Tuesdays and Thursdays (usually, but his twice-weekly column appears today, exposing the myth of "Overpopulation."). They’re the best part of the Globe!
Chip Ford—
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Hi, Chip—I hope you saw *my* column on Prop 226, which appeared on May 5. . . . I’m glad to pass
along my column. And who knows, maybe somebody, somewhere, someday will gear up a national effort
to abolish the unions’ right to collect money from unwilling workers. Even *I’ll* stand at malls and beg
for signatures when that happens.
Cheers,
JJ
A BETTER WAY TO PROTECT PAYCHECKS
By Jeff Jacoby
The Boston Globe
Tuesday, May 5, 1998
Republicans and conservatives are tingling in anticipation of a big victory next month on Proposition
226, California’s "paycheck protection" initiative. The proposed law would prohibit labor unions from
spending any part of a member’s dues on political activities unless that member first consented in
writing. Unions, accustomed to absolute control over employees’ dues, have declared all-out war; the
attack ads are already polluting California’s airwaves. But every opinion poll shows that voters strongly
endorse Proposition 226, and it seems certain to pass on June 2.
California is only the biggest of the paycheck-protection battlegrounds. Similar measures are before the legislature or headed for the ballot in at least a dozen other states. In four states paycheck-protection is already on the books. The impact can be staggering. When Washington state voters adopted paycheck-protection in 1992, 48,000 teachers were "contributing" to their union’s political fund. Within months of the new law’s passage, the number of donors dropped to 8,000.
The attractiveness of paycheck-protection is easy to comprehend. Most adults can decide for themselves which political causes and candidates to support; they don’t need their union to make the choice for them, thank you very much. The fact that union PACs lopsidedly support Democrats is especially galling, inasmuch as 40 percent of union households vote Republican. In 1995-96, seven of the top 10 contributors to federal campaigns were unions, and more than 95 percent of their largesse went to Democrats.
Union activism goes well beyond party politics. In California, members’ dues have been used to promote abortion rights, to fight the Boy Scouts’ policy on gays, and to campaign for drug legalization. Proposition 226 wouldn’t forbid unions from throwing political punches, but it would ensure that the money to do so comes only from members who have given their approval.
Except that . . . it wouldn’t.
Paycheck-protection is worth voting for, if only to force the AFL-CIO to spend millions trying to defeat it. But it isn’t going to achieve its purpose.
Tell a union it may not spend workers’ money on political activity without written permission, and you merely invite it to recast those activities as *non*political. That devastating union setback in Washington?
Look again: "No longer able to collect dues for political purposes without consent . . . the state teachers’ union simply redefined its ‘political’ program as a ‘Community Outreach Program’," reports Michelle Malkin in the Seattle Times, "and -- voila! -- $924,000 in political contributions began pouring into its coffers."
Legislation like Proposition 226 is an invitation to endless litigation. What is "political"? A brochure urging, "Vote for Blowhard"? Clearly. But what about a brochure that merely proclaims, "Blowhard is the workingman’s friend"? Or that says, "Of the AFL-CIO’s top 10 priorities, Blowhard voted for all 10"?
Besides: Why shouldn’t a union be permitted to spend members’ dues for political purposes? Since when do organizations have to get individual members’ consent before spending some of their fees on politics (or anything else)? If you belong to the Humane Society or the American Association of Retired Persons or the Doris Day Fan Club, you aren’t entitled to a veto on how your dues will be spent. Why should the rules be different if you belong to the Teamsters?
Because, paycheck-protection advocates would say, the Supreme Court said so. Over and over, conservatives point to the 1988 case of Communication Workers of America v. Beck to prove that unions are illegally misusing their members’ dues But over and over, conservatives get Beck wrong.
My elder brother pundit William Safire, for example, notes that in Beck the court held that "union members have the right to claim refunds of portions of their dues not spent on collective bargaining." The Wall Street Journal editorializes that Beck "said that union members are entitled to stop union leaders from using other people’s money, namely their dues, for politics with which they disagree." The savvy Republican strategist Grover Norquist, a prime mover behind paycheck-protection, writes that Beck "specifically forbids the use of compulsory union dues for purposes beyond the negotiation and maintenance of a member’s contract."
*But that isn’t what the court ruled.* Beck deals only with the rights of workers who are not union members—employees in a unionized workplace who decline to join the union but are forced to pay dues anyway as a condition of keeping their job. It is *they,* the justices said, who may not be compelled to pay one penny more than the amount needed for collective bargaining.
Unfortunately, most workers in union shops don’t realize that they have the right to quit the union and pay less than full dues. But that is a minor problem next to the fact that federal law allows unions to coerce dues out of nonmembers (or unwilling members) in the first place.
Paycheck-protection schemes like Proposition 226 are short-run fixes at best. With tens of millions of dollars (and a vast amount of influence) at stake, unions will always be able to figure out a way to siphon their members’ money into politics.
If Republicans really want to protect paychecks, let them enact a national right-to-work law. No employee should have to pay money involuntarily to a union as a condition of holding a job. Proposition 226 is fine as far as it goes. But to focus on union politics instead of union extortion is to pay lavish attention to the trees and miss the forest entirely.
(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for the Boston Globe. His e-mail address is jacoby@globe.com)
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"The only alternative to limited taxation and government is unlimited taxation and government"