Banquet of Consequences For Unions on Crash Diets

The 19th-Century writer Robert Louis Stevenson is widely credited with the following observation: Sooner or later everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences. For the labor movement and the Democratic Party, the June 27 Supreme Court decision in Janus v. AFSCME is the main course in a banquet of consequences served up as a result of inadequate organizing, timid decision-making, corporate cozying, and pay-to-play politics beginning in earnest during the Clinton years, and continuing on the national, state and municipal level right up to the present.

As many public-sector union members likely know by now, the Janus decision basically holds that government workers who choose not to join unions cannot be required to help pay for collective-bargaining, or most any other union operation for that matter. Janus supersedes a 1977 decision, Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, which ruled that workers who did not want to belong to a union could not be required to pay for union political activities, but did have to chip in for collective bargaining efforts. The Abood decision gave rise to the agency-fee category of worker.