By Matthew Hayward Originally posted Nov, 202017 on Freedomfoundation.com With news that the U.S. Supreme Court will hear  Janus vs. AFSCME  and the widely held belief that Mark Janus will win, ultimately bringing right-to-work (RTW) to public employees all across the country, we can anticipate Big Labor will not just give in and allow people to walk away from paying dues. You can bet government union leaders are organizing all across the country to concoct new scams that will allow them to continue to treat public employees as a cash cow for their ideological fantasies and political realities. In fact, I recently attended a  conference  put on by the  Labor Education and Research Center (LERC) , a small, taxpayer-subsidized outfit headquartered at South Seattle College. The title of the conference was “ Emerging Leaders Conference 2017  –  Social Justice Unionism in the Face of RTW. Saturday morning started out with a radical left-wing panel dis...

 Originally posted on  The Sly Economics of Government Union Activism | RealClearPennsylvania By Matthew Hayward September 11, 2023 As Labor Day loomed, the airwaves filled with pro-union sentiment, celebrating the virtues of solidarity. The union advocates didn’t have much to say, though, about the underhanded way government unions force members who want workplace representation to also pay for the unions’ social activism. The U.S. Supreme Court’s 2018 ruling in Janus v. AFSCME fundamentally altered the landscape of union membership for public employees. The decision upended the Abood v. Detroit Board of Education framework, which had allowed public employees to opt out of the portion of their union dues earmarked for explicit political activities while still mandating payment for other union advocacy efforts. The Abood framework, in other words, permitted public employees to only pay dues for workplace representational activities. Janus, however, changed the rules. It declar...

By Matthew Hayward Thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2018 ruling in Janus v. AFSCME , public employees can no longer be fired for refusing to pay their designated labor union dues . Unfortunately, state laws often still require them to remain in a relationship with a union even though they’re no longer members or paying dues. In a genuine sense, this is like the government granting an abused spouse a divorce but ordering him or her to remain with their abuser. The court recognized in Janus that forced union membership or dues is a violation of the worker’s First Amendment rights to free speech and association. But by any logical interpretation of the ruling, it also bans forced representation. So-called “union security clauses,” which stipulate that a union must represent every employee in its bargaining unit — even nonmembers — are routinely inserted into state law or the collective bargaining agreement between a governmental jurisdiction and the union claiming to repr...

Typically my focus on organized labor has to do with public-sector unions , their lack of transparency , and forced dues as a condition of employment. Private-sector unions rarely appear on my radar, but I take exception to the latest outrage in my hometown. Joint Base Lewis McCord’s 555th Engineer Brigade worked with the city of Olympia to find a building to demolish for training purposes. There are plenty of old eyesores in Olympia, so a suitable candidate for demolition wasn’t a problem. A building on the contentious Isthmus, a skinny stretch of land separating Capital Lake and the base of Puget Sound, was chosen. JBLM was excited to work with the city of Olympia to get on-the-ground training for overseas missions. Meanwhile, the city, which struggles to keep revenue above spending , was happy to have JBML donate its services. The money isn’t there to clean up Olympia, and bringing down all the buildings is expensive, so any help we can get is welcomed and needed. To the ...