So, I’m not going to link to them again (because why drive them traffic?), but the ironically named Freedom Foundation seems intent on drawing me into a pissing match. In their latest web video, their scruffy faced young spokesdude asks me (and you can tell he’s just an average Joe from his facial hair and his closet full of plaid shirts): “How does forcing someone to join a union spell freedom? Answer us that, Goldy.”
Well, as spokesdude very well knows, I can’t answer that. Because it’s a trick question. Nobody is ever forced to join a union.
Under federal law, the most a worker can be required to pay the union is an “agency fee” that covers the worker’s fair share of the cost of collective bargaining, contract administration, and the grievance process. No contract can require workers to join a union, or pay the fees that cover the union’s political activities. And yet nonmembers are still fully covered by the collective bargaining agreement negotiated between the union and the employer, receiving all of its benefits. Sweet!
What the Freedom Foundation is fighting for in its “right to work” initiatives is the freedom for nonmembers to get an entirely free ride: all of the benefits of the union contract, without paying any of the costs of negotiating or administering it. They are counting on narrow self-interest to drive individual workers to opt out of paying agency fees, bankrupting the union in the process. It is a calculated exercise in the tragedy of the commons.
So that’s the short answer to the specific question: nobody is forced to join a union.
As for scruffydude’s larger implication that being forced to pay one’s fair share of the cost of negotiating and administering a union contract is somehow a violation of one’s personal liberty, I guess the most direct response is: grow the fuck up!
I don’t get to opt out of paying for wars I oppose, or roads I don’t drive on, or a prison-industrial-complex predicated on the racist policy of jailing black men for petty crimes at much higher rates than we imprison whites. In addition, there are plenty of actual line items deducted from our paychecks to fund programs that, as individuals, we may or may not support; if you are a non-union-member employed in a unionized workplace, the agency fee may be one of them. So answer me this, spokesdude: How would paying an agency fee be any more a violation of your personal freedom than the portion of my paycheck funding Predator drone attacks and domestic NSA surveillance is a violation of mine?
Through our laws we make all sorts of collective decisions that inevitably run counter to the desires of individual members of the republic. One of those decisions, which coalesced during the previous Gilded Age, is that it would be beneficial to society to enable workers to organize collectively in order to at least partially balance the inordinate power of capital. The result was an expansion of wealth and economic opportunity unprecedented in all of human history.
That you oppose this policy, scruffydude, is clear. That the Freedom Foundation and its ALEC co-conspirators and the Koch brothers et al. who fund your cute little videos would like to free corporate America to dictate the terms of employment entirely unencumbered by government regulation or union organizing, is no secret. And you are free to pursue your agenda.
But when you crusade against the institution that won American workers the weekend, the eight-hour workday, paid overtime, workplace safety standards, workers compensation for on-job injuries, unemployment insurance, paid vacation time, the minimum wage, paid health insurance, and any number of other benefits and reforms we all now take for granted—don’t you dare pretend that it has anything to do with securing workers their freedom.
Other questions I look forward to hearing Goldy answering:
“How does forcing someone to pay living wages spell prosperity?”
“How does forcing someone to stop police militarization spell liberty?”
“How does forcing someone to join Obamacare spell America?”
Goldy, all it means is you’re a force to be reckoned with, an opinion shaper, someone they can’t ignore — in short, Washington’s most influential blogger. They’re envious. I’ll bet they don’t have a tenth of your traffic or one/hundredth of your impact in Washington politics. Who’s ever heard of Freedom Foundation? Who reads their website besides the usual gang of idiots who no longer have (un)SP to go to?
Instead of enacting a right-to-work law, our state should pass a “free rider” law prohibiting payment of union wages and benefits to those who refuse to support a union’s negotiating efforts either through membership or payment of shop fees. It should be against the law for employers to pay, and employees to receive, union pay and benefits if they have refused to support the union’s efforts to get that pay and benefits for them.
Of course, what happens in real life is states with right-to-work laws end up with weak or no unions, and wage data decisively demonstrate that workers in those states earn considerably less in wages or benefits. Why any worker would choose to live in a right-to-work state mystifies me. If I had to work (thank God I don’t) I would leave a state so antagonist toward workers or never move there in the first place.
Those states often run ads to recruit companies by bragging about what a “great place to do business” they are. Of course, you never see them running ads bragging they’re a great state to live and work in, because they’re not. A business paradise is a workers hell, that’s just the way it works.
You guys are typical liberals, always slandering true patriots like the Freedom Foundation, which continually and selflessly seeks to liberate workers from the intolerable burdends of high wages, health care, and excess limbs.
“Who reads their website besides the usual gang of idiots who no longer have (un)SP to go to?”
Hey, the voices in Jim Miler’s head ate having such a robust public dialog on that site, there’s no longer any need for pudge to call people liars. What more could a reader possibly need? :-)
@4 Wow. Its been such a long time since I’ve gone to (u)SP for anything but its voter lookup database, I hadn’t realized it had almost completely died.
Are there any righty local blogs of note in WA these days other than the Seattle Times editorial board?
@5 “Are there any righty local blogs of note in WA these days other than the Seattle Times editorial board?”
Not that I know of; they appear to be the last holdouts.
What I don’t get is why do we, on the left at least, still use the right wing’s framing of the union dues (non) payment debate? I mean, every time I hear a democrat or a liberal or anyone else who supports unions say ‘right to work’ I cringe. ‘Right to work’ doesn’t accurately communicate what the law/policy does, instead it communicates nothing more than some some random feel good value, right up there with baseball and apple pie. I mean, who can be against the right to work? What are ya, a lazy schmoozer? (the irony of course is that the law actually enables people to schmooze off their dues-paying union co-workers… but I digress). Instead, we should call it something more akin to what it actually does – the ‘right to steal from your co-workers’ law?’ The ‘right to scofflaw’ law? And use that label instead of ‘right to work’. I’m not good at coming up with these kind of things, but I’m sure some whiz could nail it with a more apropos label.
@7 – Unless urban speech is going through another of its periodic upheavals, “schmooze” doesn’t mean taking the benefits other people have worked for while you refuse to take responsibility for the work (a form of petty theft, actually). Schmoozing is intimate conversation, friendly chat, gossipy talk — there’s a sense of closeness and coziness in the Yiddish, although in English it’s also about “chatting up” someone for business or political gain. I’ve been racking my brain trying to come up with the right nuance in an English term that means grifting along on others’ efforts, but I’m old, it’s late in my day, and I’m not having much luck.
With only a Jim Miller post at (un)SP, it’s as good as dead. Perhaps not clinically dead, but damned near.
Dr. Zatoichi, the Blind Surgeon
@7 It’s usually presented as “right to work cheap” but I got a little lazy today. Actually, I’m lazy every day, and I don’t work anymore, cheap or otherwise. I’m a Greedy Capitalist now.
One of the last (u)SP threads with comments had this wonder from Smokie, a long-time commenter who exemplifies that crowd’s delightful combination of rock-solid certainty and bone-deep ignorance:
“7. HA.org? Is that still around? Why would anyone care what an broken down old ex-wannabe radio host posts or hosts?
Posted by: Smokie on July 20, 2014 06:28 AM”
Having that comment posted as that blog lay dying teally brought a warm chuckle. Some people just never learn, and (u)SP was always eager to cater to them.
Killed it.
Yeah.
@11 It’s emblematic that amid a heated national debate over a high-profile police shooting of a black teenager, and everything else going on in the world (Russia invading Ukraine, etc.), the only topic Jim Miller can think of to write about is whether some long-dead postmaster general spoke the words attributed to him 80 years ago.
It’s not new; (un)SP always was Washington’s most irrelevant blog.
There are also a number of other options that people overlook. If you have a religious objection to unions or don’t support the union in question, you can have your dues paid to a charity.
Union dues/agency fees have practically nothing to do with negotiating a contract, and everything to do with financing the unions’ political agenda.
The real cost of negotiating a collective bargaining agreement is far less than 1% of the hundreds of millions of dollars that the unions pull in every year from workers in WA state’s current forced dues arrangement.
Workers would be much better off if they could pocket the money that THEY worked hard for, instead of having to fork it over to some union boss who wants it to pay for their own bloated salary and failed agenda.
If given the choice, Washington families would gladly opt to keep more of THEIR hard earned money in THEIR pockets.
@ 16
Typical Republican. Workers, (that is people who are obligated to show up to perform actual Labor) wages are “bloated” if they have enough left over at the end of the month to feed themselves after paying off the Capital Class protection racketeers. Meanwhile, the Capitalists are complaining that they just can’t make ends meet after extracting 95% of the profits for themselves. They still “need” more. Then they sneer and defame the people who made those profits for them as being somehow sub-human, and unworthy of any consideration whatsoever, especially including fair recompense for the labor they perform on their behalf.
Thieves are thieves, no matter how many publicists they hire or public relations companies they own. Making $490 for every dollar they dribble down an employee’s back just doesn’t feed the bulldog somehow.
The guillotine is coming, and this time the engineering is going to be much better.
@16 God forbid that any “union boss” should ever live half as well as the average CEO. So far as I know, none do.
Here’s a tip for you though: Any worker who doesn’t like union pay and benefits is free to move to a “right to work” state at any time. But I don’t see I-90 choked with moving vans.
@16 Hey, nice adding to the conversation by pulling a number out of your ass. You don’t think union-busters like the Freedom Foundation would sue in a heartbeat if they caught a union violating the NLRA’s strict rules on agency fees? Hell, Freedom Foundation files PDC complaints if they catch a school teacher leaving a stack of union flyers on their desk.
The agency fee pays only for those services the law says it can pay for. Period. If you’ve got actual evidence suggesting otherwise, post a citation. Otherwise we’ll just have to assume you are posting bullshit.
It should be called “right to low pay” , not “right to work”. It should be called “low quality work” states – after the Boeing fiasco in SC.
@19 “If you’ve got actual evidence”
Probably just like their evidence of voting fraud.
Amazing how critique of unions are a higher priority for these bozos than, say, rampant corporate criminality which harms real people without providing the living wages, paid holidays, sick leave, and other benefits unions have won for American workers.
Oh, and @16, please keep your filthy nym-jacking off one of the most respected members of our local community. That goes double if you’re irrespinsibly throwing random numbers around, something the real Bill Nye would never do.
@22 I’l bet “RTW guy” doesn’t work for “right to work” wages. I’ll bet he’s an employer who pays “right to work” wages — and refuses to pay a penny more. Exactly the kind of boss who needs a union breathing down his neck.
What? No Workers? How Did That Happen?
I regularly read Barron’s magazine, despite its conservative editorial slant (eye roll) and the fact it’s a mixed bag as a news source (like the Seattle Times), because of its in-depth reporting on markets and investing.
This week’s cover story asks where have all the workers gone. I’ll explain momentarily, but first a little background.
If you follow economic news, you probably know the drop in workforce participation is a big story. The last such big story was in the 1970s when women entered the workforce in droves because most families could no longer live on a single paycheck. The story now is people are leaving the workforce in droves.
The public assumes this is due to retiring baby boomers, but that’s not so. Participation rates are actually going up in this group because fewer boomers can afford to retire. The decline is occurring in the prime work-age cohort of 25 – 54. At the same time, disability rolls have surged. In other words, a lot of people in their prime working years are trading paychecks for disability checks.
Why? For a couple reasons. One, lack of jobs. (If you can’t get a job, you need another way to pay rent and buy food.) Two, working sucks. I mean REALLY sucks!
Of course, I don’t have to tell you this. Unless you’re already on disability or retired, you know all too well that for years now bosses have been demanding more work for less pay, even as profits soared. The recession let them get away with it.
You know that Republicans and their business allies have bitterly fought any increase in the federal minimum wage, stuck at $7.25 since 2009, and went ballistic when workers demanded a $15 minimum wage. Here on HA, I’ve said to them, shove your $7.25 an hour jobs. Nobody should work for that. Nobody.
Apparently fewer people are. After all, why work for less than it costs you to work? Business owners understand the difficulty of operating at a loss in all other aspects of business. Why do they have such a hard time accepting that workers can’t work at a loss?
Anyway, here’s Barron’s predictable whiny complaint, which could readily be taken as speaking for practically every boss in America:
“The job market has made a comeback over the past year, but the American labor force hasn’t, and the prospects don’t look good. Work seems to be on the wane in the U.S., with worrisome consequences for growth.” (Quoted per fair use; you can read the entire article here: http://tinyurl.com/lbyn279)
Yeah, well, pay them and they’ll come, ya know? Would someone please tell these guys the Thirteenth Amendment has been in effect for some time now, and people no longer have to work free?
Since 1970, all the benefit of economic growth has gone to the one percent. Workers got none of it. So why should workers give a hoot about economic growth? Not shockingly, they don’t.
Older people (and rabbits) remember when workers were fiercely loyal to their companies. Problem is, a new generation of managers with no ethics took over, and companies ceased to be loyal to their workers and began thinking of them as “inputs” to be minimized or eliminated.
This made employers as popular as generals who ask their troops to make the ultimate sacrifice, and then show their heels to the battlefield. Even feudal kings couldn’t get away with such disloyalty to their subordinates; if they tried, their armies would melt away.
Well, America’s workforce is melting away. If employers don’t get a message from that, I guess our economy’s a goner. It was nice (at least for some) while it lasted.
Corporate tyrants and their media apologists (e.g., Barrons and Seattle Times editorial writers) try to justify our system’s shitty treatment of workers in terms of “competitive necessity.”
Well, here’s a competitive necessity for them: I don’t have to work, so take your shitty job and shove it! In fact, nobody should work until employers treat workers better.
And that includes big pay raises. It’s not like the economy can’t afford it; the problem is the distribution. Business has never been so profitable as right now. For years, capitalists have gotten fat on workers’ backs. Enough is enough. Pay them and they’ll come. If you don’t, they won’t.
Unions may be on the wane, with union membership down from 50% to 12% of the workforce, but even without unions there’s a limit to how much you can exploit other people’s labor.
Economists and financial pundits call it “declining workforce participation.” those are weasel words. Let’s say it like it is: America’s workers are walking out and going on strike.
Barrons is not a Drudge or WorldNutsDaily pandering to ignorant Tea Partiers. It’s an important publication because it’s read by CEOs, top-level managers, and wealthy investors. It’s well written and articulately caters to an influential and educated group of powerful decision makers. Nonethless, it has a pronounced editorial slant bordering on propaganda, sometimes a bit bombastic, that reliably helps propagate the shibboleths of conservative economic orthodoxy and pro-capitalist and pro-business self-justification. This week’s cover story on workforce participation furnishes a typical example.
Everyone in the financial media uses the same economic statistics, mostly from government agencies, which are rarely if ever questioned even if arguably impeachable. The media’s forte is interpretation. In Barrons’ case, its writers invariably cite rightwing economists and think tanks in making their arguments.
Summarizing, the Barron’s article takes the usual conservative tack of blaming government and workers for the economy’s ills. If not enough people are showing up for work, it’s because overly generous safety net programs induce sloth. If more people are going on disability rolls, it’s not because employers’ demands for more work output from workers result in increased mental stress and physical injuries, but because out-of-control lawyers profit from representing clients with disability claims.
The Barrons editor who wrote this article doesn’t hesitate to use hate language. Some samples:
“As American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Charles Murray has bluntly observed, there was a time when ‘healthy men in the prime of life who did not work were scorned as bums.'”
[Roger Rabbit Comment: Yeah, but that was when companies promised lifetime employment with decent pay and benefits if you were loyal to the company and worked hard.]
“Might the surge in prime-age males opting out reflect the fact that the wages offered were often lower than those in the high-paid union jobs of the 1960s and 1970s? Perhaps, but if that discouraged me from seeking work, it would be an indication of an eroded work ethic.”
[Roger Rabbit Comment: No, it’s an indication that cutting wages and eliminating job security reduces the worker’s incentive to work.]
“Do some of these people have independent means? … Some of these men may be … living off crime.”
[Roger Rabbit Comment: Nice. If people refuse to work at shitty jobs for shitty wages, insinuate they’re criminals.]
“The SSDI program ‘creates a very strong incentive against meaningfully participating in the formal labor market,’ says MIT economics professor David Autor, author of the November 2011 study, ‘The Unsustainable Rise of the Disability Rolls in the United States.’ The reason is simple: If you take a job, you run the risk of being terminated from the program and losing the benefits. Not that those benefits are especially generous. But … [w]hen you bear in mind that SSDI income is steady and indexed to inflation, and that it’s possible to supplement it with under-the-table money, it might not be surprising that the number of recipients has soared.”
[Roger Rabbit Comment: Nice. Assume that millions of disability recipients are cheating the system by working “underground” and not reporting income. By the way, for every worker dishonestly working under the table, there’s also an employer dishonestly employing him under the table.]
“‘There is a very powerful kind of for-profit advocacy component to getting people onto SSDI,’ says Autor. Law firms that represent claimants are given a percentage of the take, much like personal injury lawyers…. [T]he sums involved are large enough to create a special-interest group that has a stake in perpetuating the system. As Autor puts it, ‘The Social Security Administration each year pays more than $1 billion directly to attorneys that prevail against it on behalf of claimants.'”
[Roger Rabbit Comment: This statement has so many things wrong with it, it’s hard to know where to begin. First, you can’t get SSDI unless you are in fact disabled as defined by SSI’s stringent criteria, and the disability claim has to be supported by medical evidence from a doctor. We can safely say that 99% of people on SSDI are getting it because they’re eligible. Second, the SSDI program doesn’t exist because of greedy trial lawyers; Congress enacted it to fulfill an actual need. This program, by the way, directly benefits employers by shifting the costs of caring for disabled workers from business to the government. It represents government taking a major expense off employers’ backs. Third, the Social Security Administration doesn’t pay the $1 billion “directly to attorneys” except in a ministerial sense; attorney fees come out of the applicant’s award of retroactive benefits, and therefore are paid by the applicant, not by SSA. Fourth, note the phrase “that prevail”; disability attorneys and their clients get nothing unless the clients are found eligible for SSDI benefits because they are, in fact, disabled. Attorneys enter the picture because proving a claim, which involves gathering and presenting medical evidence, is too difficult and complex for most people to handle themselves without professional help.]
“Simple math gives us some idea of the program’s effects on labor-force participation. As noted, 3.3% of prime-age men were in the program in 2013, up from 1.4% in 1970.”
[Roger Rabbit Comment: Wow! 3.3% of prime-age men are on disability! That’s a national fucking crisis!]
“Because these trends have recently flattened, they may not get worse. but one new factor that is just around the corner is the depressing effect on labor-force participation of the Affordable Care Act.”
[Roger Rabbit Comment: That’s right, blame Obamacare, because you’ll lost half your Republican readership if you don’t.]
“University of Chicago economics professor Casey Mulligan … and the CBO make no judgment about whether the Affordable Care Act is worth implementing. As Mulligan remarks, ‘There is room to debate the net welfare effect of safety-net expansions, but the fact remains they have a price.’ The price in terms of reduced participation in the labor market is not one to be taken lightly.”
[Roger Rabbit Comment: That’s right, call ACA “welfare,” just so your CEO readers get the point: ACA is bad for business and the economy “because it’s welfare.”]
“During periods of sluggish growth in the economy, politicians and pundits focus on the need to create jobs. But what is needed over the long run is an increase in jobholders to create a sustained pickup in economic growth. Indeed, without them, the changes of supporting aging baby boomers through their long years of retirement will diminish.”
[Roger Rabbit Comment: Of course the one-percenters who read Barrons want economic growth, because they get all the fruits of that growth. And now that they want workers again, in order to get workers to come back and work at shitty jobs for shitty wages, let’s tell them the fruits of their labor will go to retirees even though that’s a blatant lie, and threaten retiring baby boomers with starvation if their children and grandchildren refuse to work at shitty jobs for shitty wages.]
It’s all here: Everything one-percenters want to hear, and the propagandists for the one-percent want them to believe: People who don’t work are “bums,” safety-net programs are bad because they interfere with the ability of employers to force workers to work for lower wages, stigmatizing disability benefits as “welfare” (disregarding that SSDI is an insurance program paid for with workers’ payroll taxes, which are in effect insurance premiums), bashing Obamacare, and making not-so-subtle threats that if you don’t accede to businesses’ demands for cheap labor we’ll kill your grandparents.
Why am I posting this here on HA? Because I think it’s important that you know what America’s CEOs and wealthy investors are being told by the propagandists they listen to. And yes, they believe this shit, because it’s cloaked with respectable-sounding academic names and think-tank studies, never mind how biased those cherry-picked academics and think tanks are. This is what we’re up against: The people we’re arguing with believe if you don’t work for cheap wages you’re a “bum,” and safety-net programs are “welfare” that enable slackers to live off doles, under-the-table jobs, and crime. The implication of that being, of course, those programs have to go.
We’ve got a hell of a fight ahead of us.