Or the township offered a sweetheart deal to avoid unionization, planning to roll it back after the vote fails; or they deliberately pushed a worse deal to punish the employees for unionizing; or the corrupt organizer took a bribe to take a fall with a crappy contract. There’s little we can conclude generally about unions by Justin_Bailey’s report.
You have a cite for those claims, I assume…? I’m particularly interested in the 2nd one: that unions have “no leverage” without full participation. None whatsoever. That would be an extraordinary thing to prove!
I have no proof of it. None whatsoever. It’s evident to me, and to the union leaders who fear this ruling, that partial unionization suffers from workers expecting union benefits without paying union dues (there have been anecdotes relayed on this site from partial union shops about workers complaining about the union refusing to represent them despite not joining). Part of that being evident to me is that unions don’t have a lot of leverage even with full membership.
It’s a situation much like health care in the U.S., from the opposite direction: free riders are poisonous where full membership is needed.
Except the plaintiffs in this case are not expecting union benefits without paying dues.
At any rate, I applaud you’re admitting that your claims are not citable. Many posters here would link to some trumped-up cite that wouldn’t support their claim at all.
And the free ridership is there only because of the law in question. Get rid of the law and you get rid of the free ridership.
The issue isn’t mistaken expectations, it’s the demonstrable (subjective) free rider problem without a closed shop. As with health care, the people who think they don’t need it won’t pay to have it available.
You also cripple the union’s ability to strike a fair deal for everyone due to low membership and limited financial means, and open endless avenues for management to divide and conquer, to incentivize non-membership, to punish membership, and to offload costs onto the union.
Check my join date. I know better than to accept your invitation to over-extend myself. I don’t fall for Bricker’s traps either 
Actually, nothing is more disheartening than the fact that, on this board, most of the posters are anti-union or don’t care about the basic issue. The labour movement really is dead, it’s just a long time dying.
Bad analogy. Millions of people live successful lives without belonging to union. In fact, most people do. Everyone, at some point, needs health care. Not so with unions.
Except in this case, “management” is the entity requiring that everyone join the union. Which pretty much undercuts your assumption.
Within a single workplace, given some number in the union exercising collective bargaining rights to (hopefully) maintain certain standards of employment, and others in the same workplace and jobs not joining the union because they expect the standards to be fought for and maintained without their own paycheque being docked, the analogy is properly illustrative.
As my own current experience clearly demonstrates, there’s nothing about ‘government as management’, even relatively union-friendly and labor-law supporting administrations, that precludes fucking the union as hard as one can under the right circumstances. You put “management” in quotes like that to imply that a gov’t is a singular entity with a coherent set of priorities, thus it would be incoherent for it to mandate membership while negotiating to the union’s disadvantage, even to the point of breaking the union.
“Management”, in this case, consists of state bureaucracies, elected administrations, momentary legislative landscapes, shifting priorities, and the daily horse-trading that is the meat and blood of American politics. One look at Rahm Emanuel’s relationship to the teacher’s unions in Chicago should be enough counterexample to the idea that a Democratic administration would never, ever, ever do anything but fluff the unions.
And as I observed earlier, even among a relatively progressive crowd, supporting unions is hardly guaranteed. I doubt a Democrat will lose Chronos’ vote, for instance, by bashing unions.
Sure they are; I haven’t heard about any plan to negotiate their job description, wages, vacation time, sick leave, retirement benefits, annuity contributions, health insurance, meal breaks, coffee breaks, other general terms of employment… but maybe you have a cite for that claim of yours?
You cannot force solidarity without becoming worse than the management you claim to be protecting people from. Like I said, management only has leverage over you because they are giving you something valuable in exchange. The union has leverage over you because they can stop management giving you something valuable.
I wouldn’t bring up the state of health insurance in the United States if I were you. In case you’ve forgotten, the reason health insurance is treated as a fringe benefit is because during World War 2, the US government wanted control over what benefits employees could receive. Employer-funded health cover was granted preferential treatment over individually-funded health cover not because it gave the employee a better bargaining position with their insurer, but because it gave the employee a worse bargaining position with their employer.
The more things are decoupled from your place of employment, the better your bargaining position will be. An employee who can change jobs without changing insurers and can leave a bad union without changing jobs is in a better bargaining position with all three than one where job, insurer and union are made inseparable.
Actually, you can force solidarity, and doing so has worked out pretty well for large numbers of American over many decades. Against whatever principled point you might be making about involuntary association, I can point to the role of unions in fostering an economically powerful middle class that drove the U.S. economy for a lot of years.
My point was illustrative of free riders, not of the role unions play.
I agree with this. I don’t see how it affects my point that collective bargaining has to be collective to be effective. Saying “it would be great in that other world where things are different” has little bearing on this one, where job and insurance are tied together, and removing the one entity in that tripod who most directly cares about the welfare of the workers is like unilateral disarmament–perhaps noble, usually foolish.
On the contrary, that makes your position even worse - not only are you tying the union to your job, you are also tying it to your health insurance. You want to grant the union extraordinary power to “help” the employee, and in doing so make it so that a bad union can hold your health insurance hostage as well as your job.
What do you call being forced to join a union because the job you have been offered is in a union shop and thanks to the unions paying off politicians, the laws mandate that to work in that business in that location you have to join the union. I certainly didn’t want to pay a fair amount of money in union dues, they never negotiated anything for me - I asked for a certain wage and certain other requirements and negotiated for myself when I was hired in.
You may be disheartened, but you are hopefully not surprised, given that you have a board full of folks who negotiate their own wages and benefits. Who rely on their superior skills to do so. Who are hurt by seniority and work rules. And who want their incompetent coworkers fired with minimum fuss. You have folks who have been harassed by unions, but not management. And folks who look askance at financial coercion and at the majority voting wages away from the minority.
The one of two jobs where this was an issue, I would have joined the union had I planned on sticking around for more than two years. Not much point on the short term, especially given that I was more interested in the line on my resume than on anything else. I’m glad I had the choice. The other one never ended up organizing, although apparently they’re still trying.
Not directly in Norway. But my impression is that denying non-union employees benefits given union employees would be considered illegal discrimination. (IANAL)
And although there may be varying degrees of social pressure, nowhere is it mandatory to join a union.
Viewed from the socialist citadel of Norway it seems quite absurd that this is an issue at all in the US.
In my own experience, my department wanted to give me and similar workers a raise, the union fought it tooth and nail, and eventually won. Had I been required to pay an agency fee for the union’s “representation” of me, I would have been seriously pissed off.
(The department wanted to pay the IT staff better to retain staff, who were leaving for greener pa$tures at a ferocious rate; the union wouldn’t do that unless everyone at the same pay rate got a raise, whether there was any problem with staffing or not. Good for the truck drivers, bad for IT.)
Decision is out: if a public-sector worker doesn’t wish to belong to the union, the government has no right to withhold union dues from the worker’s paycheck.
Not the outcome the unions wanted.
Certainly the outcome I hoped for.
Alito wrote the opinion, joined by the Chief, Kennedy, Scalia, and Thomas. Dissenting were Kagan, Breyer, Sotomayor, Ginsburg, and Breyer.
Yay! 
Not exactly. Reading the opinion further, it seems to be narrowly tailored to apply only to a certain class of “partial” public-sector worker. Such as the home health care workers at issue in the case. At least, that’s what the analysts are saying now. What say you, Bricker?
So is there still a requirement for public sector unions to act as the representative for all members of the bargaining unit, regardless of whether they are union members or pay dues?
The union in my workplace has such a requirement. However, unlike in this case, workers who are not union members do not pay dues or a fee of any kind. So yeah, they reap the benefits of union negotiation on wages/breaks/work environment/etc., but are not involuntarily docked for it.
It seems to me that a union required to represent workers who have no interest in joining said union have an argument that they are being unfairly burdened economically. I would have absolutely no problem with a system where union members could work under the auspices of their contract, while workers who chose not to join the union could negotiate their own individual situations. If you’re saying the unions need to earn their way to getting workers to sign up, the benefits of membership need to be limited to, you know, the members. That’s the only fair comparison.
Of course, one would have to watch out for sweetheart deals given out by management in order to weaken the union local until it dies, only then to double down on their drones once they have no choice … do I sound overly paranoid?