SCOTUS MAY KILL PUBLIC EMPLOYEE UNIONS NEXT WEEK

by Bob Walsh

Next week SCOTUS is scheduled to hear the case of Janus vs. AFSCME, out of Illinois. This case will determine the future of what is commonly called Fair Share or Agency Fee. This is the process by which an public employee union can compel non-members to pay a substantial "fee" to the union for the costs of providing representation for them, but allegedly NOT including costs of political action. That, of course, is a lot of horsecrap and the unions mostly manage to bury a lot of overhead into their agency fees.

Some public employee unions, mostly those in the public safety sector, will I suspect do just fine. The association that represents the California Highway Patrol does NOT charge a fair-share fee and has a membership in the high 90% range. I do, however, fully suspect that a lot of members would bail on many of the more liberal, more mainstream associations like AFSCME.

In my experience members of those organization are actually much more conservative than the hierarchy of those organization and do not like what the organizations do with their money. In addition many of those organizations are not really democratic and their paid staff makes many of the determinations about the direction in which the organization moves. Such decisions IMHO SHOULD be made by the membership via their elected officials, not by paid staff.

In any event it will be REALLY INTERESTING to see which way SCOTUS goes.