The Wall Street Journal
Review and Outlook, March 9^th, 1998

Fairness and the Unions

Washington was filled with lamentations and wailing over the defeat of the McCain-Feingold but campaign finance reform isn't dead for this year. It returns before the House later this month, but we suspect that enthusiasm will wane when the House version is on the table. It includes a Paycheck Protection bill, which would bear unions and corporations from deducting money for politics from people's paychecks- without their written permission.

There is a standing belief in some quarters that this is a corporate-led-effort to limit unions. In reality, union muscle has scared away most corporations from contributing to Proposition 226, the paycheck protection initiative on California's June ballot. Unions, on the other hand, are likely to spend $20 million or more-most of it of course swept automatically from members' paycheck-to oppose the right of their members not to have dues money spent on politics they dislike.

AFL-CIO President John Sweeney wants to talk about anything these days-except the rights of the 35% to 40% of union members who routinely vote Republican but nonetheless have their dues money spent on liberal cause and candidates. In California, 97% of union political money is spent on Democrats, and many members are fed up. "Every time I turn around they are giving money to crackpots on the other side of some issue I care deeply about," says Bill Russell, a Communications Worker of America member.

But there won't be much balance about views like this in the well funded union barrage against Prop 226. These are cases in which corporations have required employees to contribute to a company PAC, and unions have properly complained. Prop 226 would ban both unions and management from using compulsory deductions for a political agenda.

Instead, the unions will argue that Prop 226 is an attempt to silence the voice of workers and to promote "a radical right-wing agenda." Such tactics are likely to reduce the 2 to 1 support the initiative now enjoys in the polls from both union and non-union members. It'd be nice if some corner of the California establishment would raise the issue of compulsory paycheck deductions for partisan politics, but don't hold your breath.

Should Prop 226 pass, the unions have already signaled they'll be in court. William Gould, the pro-union chairman of the National Labor Relations Board, believes paycheck protection itself is unconstitutional. "Federal labor law pre-empts state law absent special directives from Congress or overriding local interest," he told a labor conference, in a novel interpretation of the law last month. But Mr. Gould's NLRB itself has been the primary reason that enforcement of the Supreme Court's Beck decision has been almost nonexistent for most of the past decade. That flouting of the law of the land is the direct cause of the movement to pass these measures ending the practice of forced political deductions.

Washington state has been down this road already. In 1992 its citizens voted 72% to pass the first paycheck protection law. The Washington Education Association, the local NEA affiliate, soon saw political contributions to its PACs fall to $132,000 a year from $576,000 a year after automatic deductions were ended. This despite the fact that union membership grew by 7,000.

The WEA panicked and set up a new dues-funded "community outreach program" to continue politics as usual. WEA lobbyist Robert Maier admitted in a deposition that "it was an internal ploy to raise more WEA-PAC money." In 1996, the union spend much of that money in a successful effort to defeat a charter school initiative. Democratic Attorney General Christine Gregoire concluded that $410,000 of the money the union spent against charter schools was secretly contributed in violation of disclosure requirements by the parent national Education Association.

In a settlement last month, the NEA agreed to pay $37,000 in fines, while its state affiliate will pay a $39,000 fine, $ 20,000 in attorneys fees and must reimburse state teachers $330,000 in dues money. This misallocation of dues for political purpose is the largest campaign finance violation in the state's history and has led the Evergreen Freedom Foundation to file a lawsuit to toughen enforcement of the state's paycheck protection law.

When the McCain-Feingold bill was up before the Senate, one of the big preoccupations was its indictment of independent groups that use voluntary donations to exercise their rights of political free speech. There's nothing at all voluntary now about the tribune all union members have to pay to their national leadership's politics. It's a subject that deserves a full public airing when the House takes up campaign reforms later this month.

Evergreen Freedom Foundation P.O. Box 552, Olympia, WA 98507 Phone: (360) 956-3482, Fax: (360) 352-1874 Email: effwa@effwa.org

Quotables:

"To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves, is sinful and tyrannical." - Thomas Jefferson

"If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind." - John Stuart Mill