It's The Real News Network.
I'm Sharmini Peries coming to you from Baltimore.
The US Supreme Court heard arguments for what could be one of its most important cases in
labor history.
The case is Janus vs. AFSCME has to do with the issue of whether public sector unions
are allowed to require non-members to pay union fees.
Janus is a worker and AFSCME is the American Federation of State, County and Municipal
Employees.
Now that conservatives have the majority in the Supreme Court again, with Trump's appointment
of Neil Gorsuch, it seems likely that the court will rule against AFSCME that would
make life much more difficult for public sector unions as public sector employees stop.
If they stop paying union fees while still benefiting from union services.
Joining me now to discuss the consequences of this decision is . Bill has served as a
senior staff person in the National AFL-CIO.
His most relevant book for this discussion is "They're Bankrupting Us!": And 20 Other
Myths about Unions.
Thanks for joining me, Bill.
My pleasure.
Thank you, Sharmini.
Bill, a large part of the argument heard in the Supreme Court centered around unions basically
forcing non-members to speak in favor of political candidates that unions chose to support.
Now, aside from the questionable argument of conservatives that money is a speech and
that speech is protected by the first amendment, is it even true that public sector unions
force their members to support certain candidates?
No, it's completely ludicrous.
Anyone who knows anything about unions knows that that's not true.
A union is an organization of workers.
Unions endorse candidates.
Usually there's some sort of vote by the executive board of the union.
Sometimes there's an referendum of the union members and the union takes a position.
But even after taking a position, it's not as if the members of the union have to do
or have to go along with that vote.
What's really at stake here, Sharmini, is that it costs money to represent workers.
That's the basic issue.
This is not about freedom of speech.
So, when a worker is represented by a union, that means that if a worker has problems on
the job, the union is there to help them and the union is there to represent them.
That takes resources.
That doesn't happen based on magic.
So, the idea of what are called agency fees is to help to defray the cost of representation.
That's what's going on.
The conservatives don't want that because what they want is to appeal to greed on the
part of individuals so that you'll have individual workers who will say, "Well, I'm not gonna
pay anything, yet I want to be represented by the union."
That's whats at stake in this court decision.
They might not even actually say that they want to be represented by the union because
they're going to benefit from having the union in the shop anyway.
So, one of the things about all of this is that the likelihood of this actually passing
and we already know that when this case was before the courts last year, when there were
only eight justices and it was divided four to four, so now that the Republicans or the
conservatives have Gorsuch on the court, it seems likely that the conservatives will win.
Now, if this is the case, what will be the consequences for public sector union membership
and their ability to participate in political processes?
Well, there's two points there, Sharmini.
First, I don't think anything except death is a sure thing.
So, I don't necessarily think that we should just simply assume that the court will do
this because when the court was split in the Friedrichs decision, which is the one that
you were discussing before, that was because Justice Scalia had died.
So, there were different things at stake.
Some of the justices could vote or the conservatives could vote a particular way and know that
it would make no difference.
What's different now is that if the justices rule in favor of Janus, they are going against
more than 20 years of precedent and the court normally doesn't like to do that.
So, it's not to me a sure thing.
I think it's likely that they will, but it's not a sure thing.
Now, if the court does rule in favor of Janus and against AFSCME, what this will mean is
that individuals who are paying agency fees will no longer have to do that and they will
mean that they will be represented.
It means that they will have the benefits.
It means that they can file grievances and do all of that for free.
And the effect of that will be to weaken the ability of the union to operate because if
there are large numbers of workers who are asking the union as an organization to work
on their behalf, yet they're not paying anything?
Think about it this way, Sharmini.
Imagine a city that made taxation voluntary, yet guaranteed everybody free public education,
police, fire and sewer.
Just imagine that.
There's no institution in the United States that would accept such a thing, yet that's
in fact what is being asked of unions.
Bill, union membership has been declining for decades now.
What do you think unionization rate in public and private sectors and what are the reasons
for the decline?
Several things.
The unionization in the United States overall is about 11%.
Unionization in the public sector is around 30%.
In the private sector, it's about 7%.
And the reasons for this decline since 1955 when unionization was about 35% rest in two
areas.
One is very vicious repression by employers and resistance, actually theres a third area
which is labor law, which has not caught up with the changes in workforce since the 1930s.
And the third factor is the unions themselves, that the unions since, certainly since the
1950s, have not engaged in the kind of organizing, bargaining, that they need to in order to
retain and grow.
Retain the kind of membership that they need and to grow.
There has been for too many years of lackluster approach to organizing that began to change
in early 1990s when new leaderships emerged in a number of unions.
But even then, there was not enough of an internal transformation process.
So, these three factors contributed to this situation.
Let me just say one other thing about this.
Many people in the United States do not realize that the United States has the history, the
most violent history, of labor management relations of any of the advanced capitalist
countries and that is because of employer resistance, not because of what workers do.
Ever since the 1800s, employers have tried to do everything in their power to stop workers
from organizing and stop workers from bargaining.
In the public sector where there's been fewer restrictions in terms of organizing, that's
one of the reasons that union membership has been able to grow, except in the south and
in the southwest.
Bill, some analysts has argued that the militancy of unions have declined with a closed shop,
that they don't have to really fight for things.
Do you agree with that sentiment?
No.
No, you're talking about this thing called union shops where basically what happens is
that after someone is hired, they work for a certain number of days and then they, assuming
that they stay on the job, they automatically become union members unless they have some
personal or religious objection.
No, that's not what stopped the militancy.
What stopped the militancy really goes back to the late 1940s and the development of the
Cold War when there were efforts to suppress union militancy through instruments such as
the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947.
What happened there is that unions that were the most militant were frequently branded
Communist, irrespective of who their leadership was and they were chased out of the union
movement in many cases, sometimes actively destroyed.
So, it was that kind of response that had an effect.
The other part was that there were those that remained in organized labor that actually
believed at a certain point, much like Neville Chamberlain believed in 1938 in facing Nazi
Germany, that they had achieved peace in our time and that employers had come to accept
unions.
And employers never came to accept unions, they just simply were waiting for the best
opportunity to move forward and crush unions.
Now, Bill, the Republican resistance to the unionization and supporting unions and so
forth, is that largely because unions end you supporting democrats in elections or is
this a sort of a Republican values that to support corporations and employers over workers?
Yeah, no, it's more the latter.
Republicans ideologically, well, let me back up, Sharmini.
There was a point when there was actually a so called liberal wing of the Republican
party.
This is back in the 1960s when you had senators like Jacob Javits, you had Nelson Rockefeller
became vice president of the United States.
You had a number of Republicans who actually would be described as liberals and they, to
different extents, accepted unions.
But there was a current that developed within, or exited within the Republican party, particularly
as the Republicans embraced more right wing ideas and constituencies and the idea was
that unions got in the way of profits.
And unions got in the way of the totalitarian dominance of the workplace by employers.
So, this becomes a very, very important ideological point.
Now, the rhetoric of the Republican party is that they would be more open to unions
if unions backed them in elections.
That's sort of sophistry because the problem is that in the elections, the Republican candidates
more often than not run on platforms that are anti-worker, anti-regulations, anti-protection
of workers.
So, why would unions support people that are trying to kill us?
It doesn't make any sense.
So, it really is something very ideologically driven.
There's this whole notion of so called free enterprise, the free market, individualism,
all of these various myths and the idea is that unions get in the way of this.
All right, Bill.
So much more to discuss on this issue, but let me ask you finally, when is a decision
expected to come down and is that the final say?
It's expected in late spring.
It could be very late, like in June and that's it.
If they decide, they decide.
Now, certainly if there was a change in Congress, it would be possible to rewrite a federal
labor legislation.
But the real issue right now, Sharmini, is that unions need to assume the worst.
That means that they need to be organizing their members, making sure that they're recruiting
people, but also, and in some ways even more importantly, they need to be reaching out
to the broader community so that the broader public understands that unions are organizations
for economic and social justice, not organizations that are for special interest.
Then I must ask you before you go, is there anything that people can do between now and
when the decision comes down to influence the decision?
The Supreme Court always likes to lead people to believe that nothing can be done.
My experience is that when people are in the streets, when there are massive protests,
when there is a real, strong presence in the media, all of that has an impact on the conscience
and the consciousnesses of the Supreme Court justices.
All right, Bill.
I thank you so much for joining us.
My pleasure.
Thank you very much.
And thank you for joining us here on The Real News Network.
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