This varies. On the college campuses where I’ve been in unions, the dues are the same whether you wish to be a full, active member or a unit member. If you don’t want your money to go to political matters, you simply check a box on the form, or else you write a letter making your statement known.
That’s easy. I experienced that when I was a teacher.
Let me practice:
You get nothing. No cost of living adjustment…no ‘steps’…oh, and we will be raising your contribution to health care…oh and we are switching health care providers to a weaker policy. Don’t like it? There’s the door.
Wow! That was easy! (and brings back memories as I went pretty much exactly through that my last year of teaching when I tried to ‘individually’ negotiate - I took the door).
As has been recognized by Nobel Prize winning economists the “closed shop” only existed in America because of special rights and privileges given to the unions by the government. Such a system would have great difficulty in being created out of pools of unskilled laborers (guild systems on the other hand, with specialized craftsmen is a different matter as we all know from history.) So yeah, in 1948 Federal law prohibited the closed shop, as in outright criminalized it.
However it does not prevent the “agency shop” which is what you had in Wisconsin. An agency shop basically means the employer will only recognize and deal with one specific union, and that the employer will take from all employees an amount of money that is then given to the union. This is under the theory that the union is acting as an agent for all employees and thus all employees whether they want membership or not must pay to support it.
No one can deny that this is good for the union, but that isn’t an end in and of itself. I think that in general in the EU where employees actually have a choice between joining several different unions in some cases you get a lot more “bang for your buck” so to speak out of union membership. Unions that have no performance incentive to provide for their members basically only provide for their members as well as the union leadership feels is necessary to maintain their leadership positions. It is a system which opens up a wide avenue for abuses, as many people will pay little attention to the goings ons of the union in an agency shop so a small cabal of individuals can basically profit to the detriment of the rest of the membership.
What’s interesting to me is that some of the features of unionized teachers that teachers hold most dear: tenure and compensation, don’t seem to be harmed significantly by a lack of unionization. As we have seen, several States which have actively prohibited teacher’s unions have generous employee tenure terms and have well compensated employees.
However at the core, and something that his opponents still refuse to even acknowledge: Scott Walker did nothing to private sector unions, he attacked public sector unions. If a union is an employee collective which can tilt power and benefit away from the employer to the employee, which I think everyone will agree it is, then it is simply (as FDR and leftists have said) unconscionable to have a public sector union because you are then creating blocs of public servants that can operate to the detriment of the public at large. The whole point of public service is in fact providing service to the public, for that reason it makes no sense to allow those servants to fleece their employer.
A private manufacturing firm is a far different beast from a State government, because the stakeholders in government are the entirety of society–so the real interest in issues of benefit packages and compensation must be what is in the best interests of society at large. The needs of the few (the employed State workers) cannot outweigh the needs of the entire State.