State’s Forced Membership Law An Engine Of Corruption
Last month, the Washington Education Association agreed to pay the largest assessment in the history of Washington state for campaign finance violations. It vindicates me and the other teachers who first complained to the Public Disclosure Commission about WEA’s illegal use of our union dues - teachers whom WEA publicly ridiculed as “disgruntled dinosaurs.”
The state attorney general’s settlement guidelines are alarming, however, because they give not only WEA, but all unions, carte blanche permission to donate mandatory dues to WEA’s political action committee and other political organizations that many members find offensive. This directly contradicts the intent of the law passed by 72 percent of the voters to protect workers from being forced to fund political causes they don’t support.
Current law requires unions to obtain annual written consent before deducting money from our paychecks for political contributions. However, the agreement allows mandatory dues that already have been taken to be given as political contributions.
Thus, Attorney General Christine Gregoire virtually guarantees bold new dues increases as union officials gleefully celebrate her decision. Her guidelines will allow the union to donate mandatory dues to any cause or organization, in state or out, to advance its political objectives. The guidelines also state that WEA may use mandatory dues to organize parents, businesses and others to advance its political objectives.
Yet, much of the union’s activity is unconnected from education and workplace issues - activity that not only isn’t supported by the rank and file, but is forcefully opposed by many.
Teachers, meanwhile, are stuck paying higher and higher fees to a union that pays less and less attention to their real interests. Gregoire’s settlement does nothing to promote union accountability and fidelity to individual rights - rights that are the key to maintaining union integrity.
What Gregoire’s settlement has done is focus attention on the real problem for workers: the inherent injustice of Washington’s forced union law. Union officials want forced union laws because they give them power over workers and their paychecks. But, one person’s power is another’s loss of liberty, human dignity and self-respect. That isn’t how unions started. Samuel Gompers, founder of the American Federation of Labor, urged a unionism devoted ‘to the fundamentals of human liberty - the principles of voluntarism.”
Gompers explained, “No lasting gain has ever come from compulsion. If we seek to force, we but tear apart that which, united, is invincible.”
Forced unionism results in complacency about serving workers who pay the dues. Maybe that is why the Wall Street Journal reports, “Seven years into one of the greatest economic expansions in decades, union membership continues to fall, both in absolute numbers and as a percentage of the work force.”
If workers really believed the unions were protecting their rights and interests, they would flock to membership.
Gompers’ devotion to the principles of voluntary unionism were validated by the recent Sacred Heart Medical Center contract agreement. When union officials backed down from their unjust demands for forced unionism, the strength and power of voluntary unionism was demonstrated.
Consequently, the real objectives of rank-and-file nurses were accomplished - namely, patient care. If that were only the case in education!
It seems clear that no carefully crafted initiative nor any politically driven public servant can overcome the natural evolution of a forced union law into union corruption and worker abandonment. Maybe it’s time to rethink forced unionism and give freedom a try.
In the meantime, the nonunion teachers’ class action lawsuit against WEA will be tried in federal court on Sept. 14. The burden will be on the union to prove that expenditures are for true “representation” and not politics.
At present, the only way to protect your rights is to resign from the union and challenge what it claims is spent on collective bargaining, contract maintenance and grievance representation. If you are afraid to do this, what does that tell you about your union?
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