It’s a strange list, but it proves the point: Where are the great names from labor’s fabled past? Where are the Auto Workers? The Steelworkers? The Mineworkers? The Teamsters? Anyone trying to understand why Al Gore wants to expand government and spend the surplus rather than give it back to the people who earned it need look no further than this soft money list. Unlike Clinton, Gore is no more of a New Democrat than Walter Mondale. They both sold their souls to the unions, the quid pro quo being more public spending because that will increase the number of public employees, the most readily available pool of new union members and New Labor’s best chance for improving its cash flow.
This is a risky strategy. Since 1980, according to The New York Times, between 32 percent and 40 percent of the voters in union households have voted Republican. In 1996 the AFL-CIO conducted a special $35 million campaign to unseat the Republican Congress elected in 1994. Yet a survey showed that 62 percent of union members opposed that spending and fully 59 percent of them would have liked their share of that money given back to them.
Fortunately, they have the support of the U.S. Supreme Court. In the 1988 case Beck v. Communications Workers, a decision written by its most liberal member, William Brennan, the Court said it violates the First Amendment to force employees, over their objections, to pay union dues that are used to support political candidates or causes. President Bush’s only attempt to enforce Beck came in 1992, when he issued an executive order requiring federal contractors to inform their employees of their Beck rights. That order was soon rescinded by President Clinton. Since 1993, the Clinton administration, Democratic members of Congress, federal judges, and NLRB members appointed by Clinton have been engaged in a vast ruling class conspiracy with union leaders to keep employees covered by union contracts ignorant of their First Amendment rights under Beck, making it as difficult as possible for them to object and recover the political contribution portion of their dues.
Beck is the labor movement’s unacknowledged Achilles heel. If the rights of employees recognized by the Supreme Court in that decision are ever enforced, it will doom John Sweeney’s strategy of organizing the working poor along with more public employees in an attempt to reintroduce class warfare into American life through political campaign contributions. Beck doesn’t just make it illegal to take union dues from employees over their objections and use them for political contributions. It says you can’t use their dues for anything other than what directly benefits them: collective bargaining, contract administration, and processing grievances. What that means, in plain English, is that when an employee objects you can’t legally spend his union dues for political campaigns or for organizing other workers. The NLRB, labor’s lapdog, predictably disagrees, but its recent decision to that effect will be reversed on appeal.
In Beck the Court found that fully 79 percent of union dues were spent on activities that did not directly benefit the dues-paying workers. In Washington state, where voters passed a Paycheck Protection Initiative in 1992, 85 percent of the state’s teachers declined to have their dues spent on political contributions. Imagine what would happen to New Labor if it lost two-thirds of its revenue. No one in Congress would ever return John Sweeney’s phone calls.
Most employees in unionized workplaces are unaware of their rights under Beck. A 1996 survey of 1,000 union members by Americans for a Balanced Budget revealed that 78 percent did not know they had a right to obtain a refund for that portion of their dues spent on political contributions. You can be certain that figure would approach 100 percent if they were asked about their right to refunds for dues spent on organizing.
Why aren’t companies doing more to educate their employees about Beck? Largely because it’s not in their interest for unions to increase spending on contract administration or grievance processing, expenditures approved by Beck. That would cause problems, possibly reduce productivity. Plus, any company that tried to inform its own employees of their Beck rights would face union reprisals.
Nor are we likely to see a concerted national effort by unionized companies to educate their employees. The Business Roundtable and the National Chamber of Commerce are too focused on bottom-line issues such as tort reform to be bothered with the constitutional rights of blue-collar stiffs. They probably think it serves them right for voting for a union in the first place.
New Labor could not survive without its continuing cash flow unconstitutionally confiscated from employees ignorant of their rights. Could Congress enact legislation enforcing Beck rights in a meaningful manner, as the initiative in Washington state did by requiring explicit approval for political spending? A Republican one might. Such legislation has been narrowly defeated in the past. Would a new president sign it? Not if his name is Al Gore. And only maybe if it’s George W. Bush. Keep in mind that a lot of those don’t-rock-the-boat Business Roundtable types have given money to the Bush campaign.
Unions as we knew them in the 20th century are near death. An unconstitutionally acquired cash flow may keep them afloat for a while, but it’s only a matter of time. New Labor, public employees and the working poor, will fare no better. They have only a marginal role in the 21st century’s post-industrial economy. Government can’t save New Labor now, any more than it could save Old Labor 40 years ago, when it started its downhill slide. It can only delay the inevitable.
The leaders of New Labor have chosen a path that will not lead to recovery. It is based almost entirely on support from the ruling political class, which allows them to exploit public employees and the working poor to generate the revenue for contributions to Democratic politicians. By turning their backs on their members, New Labor’s leaders are living precariously. Because of Beck, they are just one election away from ruin–a sad end for a once proud movement that now puts cash flow ahead of its members.
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قبلة الوداع|8.16.11 @ 11:03PM|#
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