America’s public-sector unions have a problem they can’t explain away: Workers are leaving.
Ask a public employee when they joined their union and most couldn’t tell you. Because they didn’t join. The dues just started coming out of their check.
That’s not a membership, and for decades nobody told workers they could opt out.
That changed in 2018, when the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed in Janus v. AFSCME that no government employee can be forced to join or pay dues to a labor union.
Hundreds of thousands opted out the moment they found out— the Freedom Foundation alone has helped more than 265,000 workers exercise their First Amendment rights since the ruling was issued.
Union leaders don’t talk about that number.
For decades, public-sector unions ran on automatic – automatic dues collection, automatic membership, automatic political spending – whether the worker wanted it or not.
The National Education Association confiscated $390 million in dues revenue during the most recent fiscal year from nearly 2.9 million members – most of it seized directly from taxpayer-funded paychecks before the workers could even see it.
In California alone, public education unions are estimated to collect more than $800 million per year. That money doesn’t come from convincing workers the union is worth it. It comes from a system designed so workers never had to be asked.
When the Supreme Court exposed their scheme in Janus, unions had to find other ways to keep the cash spigot open — including literally criminalizing their opposition.
Oregon, for example, effectively passed a law last year making it illegal to send public employees a mailer explaining their right to opt out. In theory, the law only bans marketing materials whose sender attempts to deceive the recipient into believing it was sent by their union. But in practice, the legislation is written so broadly that a left-leaning judge could easily construe nearly any outreach to union members as such an impersonation, subjecting the sender to potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines.
To be clear, the law is specifically intended to thwart the Freedom Foundation, which has helped thousands of public-sector union members in Oregon opt out of their union. And other blue states are following suit.
Yeah right, they want protection and benefits Unions negotiate for them but don’t want to pay Union dues. Right to Work laws promote this unethical behavior.