Freedom Foundation hails Janus ruling

The U.S. Supreme Court’s long-awaited ruling today in Janus v. AFSCME essentially turns the entire nation into a right-to-work state by affirming the right of government employees to keep their jobs while declining to pay dues or representation fees to a labor union.

The ruling overturns a 1977 decision (Abood v. Detroit Board of Education) that recognized using the workers’ dues money to fund political speech with which they might disagree is a violation of their First Amendment rights but also allowed unions to continue charging even non-union workers a fee that ostensibly reimburses the union for bargaining on their behalf.

The Freedom Foundation, a West-coast free-market think tank with branch offices in Olympia, WA., Salem, Ore., and Orange County, Calif., has long supported overturning Abood and is a recognized leader in the national right-to-work movement.

Please consider including the following quotes from the Freedom Foundation’s Oregon Director, Aaron Withe in any story you might be planning about the Janus decision:

1. Overturning Abood:

“The Abood decision has, for over four decades, allowed government unions to line their pockets off the backs of public employees. They exploited a loophole in the law that recognized the rights of employees to opt out of union membership but still forced them to pay fee’s. The U.S. Supreme Court has righted that wrong.”

2. What right-to-work really entails:

“This decision still allows workers to organize and bargain collectively if they choose to, but it doesn’t force them to and will allow them to keep their jobs if they don’t. Government unions will have to start to earn other people’s money like the rest of the private sector. They will no longer be handed the money of people who don’t support them. If they cannot earn their dues, then like any other private sector business, they will become extinct.”

3. The unions’ true objective:

“Government unions goal, like any other business, is to raise revenue, the issue here is that the only way they can do that is by growing government. In order to grow government, they need to raise taxes on the private sector, so they fund a radical leftwing agenda to do just that. This agenda mostly has nothing to do with providing benefits to those represented employees.”

4. Free riders:

“The problem here isn’t free ridership it’s, forced ridership. The “benefits” these employees get from the union is opinion based. A prime example of this is in their pay system, a hard-working public employee is capped at a salary level regardless of any additional work performed. For these employees, this “benefit” hinders their ability to be rewarded or incentivized for additional work performed. Unions have the ability to not represent non-members, but have, and will, choose not to because of the consequences of public employees being better off without representation.”

5. What’s next:

“We’ve been battling government unions for a few years now and experience has shown that unions aren’t going to start following the law just because the supreme court says it has to. They will continue to deceive their members and lock them into paying union dues. Unions have been preparing for this case for years and have taken steps to prevent even non-members from paying dues. We will continue to inform the hundreds and thousands of government employees in Oregon, and then we will protect and enforce their rights through the legal process in order to free workers from union bondage.”