Posts tagged government workers
Washington: Worker’s story illuminates unions’ dirty little secret
August 6, 2024 // It’s demonstrably unconstitutional to recognize the workers’ rights only when you feel like it, but so far the courts have let unions get away with it. The Freedom Foundation deals with such machinations daily, recognizing them as dirty tricks meant to discourage members from ending their dues. The organization’s mission is to navigate these obstacles and ensure workers can exercise their rights at the appropriate times. WFSE, Washington’s largest state worker union, saw its membership numbers drop precipitously last year, losing about 700 members — which equates to roughly $700,000 in lost annual revenue.
AZ Supreme Court Strikes Down Union ‘Release Time’ on Taxpayers’ Dime
July 31, 2024 // In this case, the city signed a Memorandum of Understanding, or MOU, with a local unit of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees union. Under that MOU, the city gave the union several release time benefits, including four full-time release positions. In other words, the city paid four employees to work exclusively for the union on the taxpayers’ dime. The MOU said the cost of release time counted as part of the “total compensation” paid to all unit employees, whether members of the labor union or not. But that raised a problem: if release time was being paid as part of their “total compensation,” then it violates the free expression and association rights of these employees to force them to give up their compensation to fund the political speech of union representatives with whom these employees disagree. That was just what the U.S. Supreme Court said in the 2018 landmark Janus ruling.
NEW YORK: The Union Gave Them the Wrong Data. The Pols Cited It Anyway.
April 12, 2024 // Meanwhile some school districts are considering layoffs because they used temporary COVID funds to staff up (again, contrary to union claims about Tier 6 hindering hiring). Finally, Senator Jackson and Mayor Evans borrowed a dubious line from labor, bemoaning how state law now “mandates a retirement age of 63 with 40 years of service.” Trouble is, it doesn’t. Nothing in state law requires anyone to work 40 years for anything. People need only work five years to vest in a public pension in New York (which Governor Hochul and lawmakers trimmed from 10 years in 2022). And they can begin collecting a reduced pension as young as age 55. Malik Evans
Union Power Slips as Percentage of Union Jobs Declines
February 6, 2024 // “Increasingly, Americans realize they can negotiate their own workplace terms without handing over part of their hard-earned paycheck to a union boss who probably doesn’t even know their name,” Ashley Varner of the Freedom Foundation told The Center Square. “Government employee unions are highly political organizations that aren’t held accountable to a profit-margin or a consumer base and government workers are seeing they get more value from keeping those union dues dollars in their pockets to put more gas in their cars and more food on their family dinner table.”
COMMENTARY: Good news: 2023 won’t mark a union revival
January 3, 2024 // The decline of union membership has been remarkably steady over the last four decades. Since 2000, the year-to-year change in the unionization rate has been positive only six times, and those small gains have quickly been reversed. Moreover, the latest data show that unionization is increasingly concentrated in the government sector, especially local services such as K-12 education and public safety. Only 6% of private sector workers are union members.
Seattle workers rally for new contract, express outrage over city proposal
September 21, 2023 // Cat Hernandez, a Seattle Dispatcher’s Guild member, highlighted the city’s vocal commitment to equity, race and social justice, challenging city leaders to uphold those stated values in giving city employees a living wage. Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda attended the rally in support of the workers, stressing to the crowd they were not only fighting for fair wages and improved working conditions but also for the city to address its housing problem, affordability and the climate crisis.
Congress Should Protect Federal Workers from Union Coercion
August 10, 2023 // Any other business enterprise attempting to sell nearly irrevocable memberships without disclosing the terms up front would swiftly find itself in the sights of federal regulators. Just last month, the Federal Trade Commission sued Amazon in federal court for “failing to clearly and conspicuously disclose all material terms of the transaction” before signing people up for Prime memberships and “failing to provide a simple cancellation mechanism.” It’s time unions started playing by the same rules. The Paycheck Protection Act, just introduced in Congress by Representative Eric Burlison (R., Mo.), would increase union accountability by ending the collection of union dues via payroll deduction by federal agencies. Given the ubiquity and ease of electronic payment methods, there is simply no good reason to force taxpayers to subsidize a dues-collection system for a private, politically divisive special-interest group.
Five Years after Janus, Government Unions Are Weaker — and More Desperate
July 5, 2023 // When SEIU HCII, which operates across four states, is removed from the picture, the overall public-sector-union membership in Illinois has decreased by over 10 percent. These declines are not isolated to a single entity but spread across all public employers, with teachers’ unions such as the Illinois Education Association and Illinois Federation of Teachers losing a combined 9.4 percent of their members or fee-payers. AFSCME Council 31 — the union that represented Janus — has seen an 18.5 percent drop. A significant decrease in union membership is a sign that workers are exercising their Janus freedoms. It also means that $25 million didn’t flow into government-union coffers in 2022. This is a financial blow to a movement that’s accustomed to having huge cash reserves to fund the politicking that gets the union bosses exactly what they want. Such a dramatic shift illustrates how many government workers feel underrepresented by their unions, pushing them to distance themselves from groups now charging more and delivering less. Which points up another consequence of Janus: Government unions are in a fight for their lives. Desperation has made them even more polarizing, extreme, and political — and greedy.
ONE-THIRD OF SEIU WORKERS REJECT UNION MEMBERSHIP
June 8, 2023 // At least one-third of workers represented by the Service Employees International Union Healthcare Illinois-Indiana, or SEIU HCII, don’t seem to think the union’s services are worth their money. The union’s website claims it represents more than 91,000 workers in four states, but its most recent report to the U.S. Department of Labor revealed it has fewer than 60,000 members.