How To Save A Union--Strong Arm Tactics

George Will looks at union tactics to ensure their survival when most American workers don't belong to a union.

Last Thursday, the Supreme Court ruled 9 to 0 against the Washington Education Association (WEA), Washington state's teachers union, which was claiming a perverse government-conferred entitlement. Five days later, organized labor and its political allies, including she who would be president, marched in Washington, D.C. They were asking Congress to deny to workers, whom unions are trying to organize, the right to a secret ballot. Both cases also illustrate the increasingly casual resort to abridgements of the rights of free speech and association.

Contrary to what some people, including me initially, thought, the Davenport case really is not about campaign finance or free speech, but about a person's First Amendment associational rights, that is whether an agency fee payer wants to be associated with a union's political message or not.

Amazingly, the WEA convinced the state Supreme Court that requiring it to ask permission before using other people's money -- for political speech that those people do not want to finance -- was an unconstitutional burden on the WEA's right of free speech. This novel (to be polite) theory did not persuade even one of the nine often fractious justices of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Speaking for the court, Justice Antonin Scalia noted that when government allows agency-shop arrangements, it creates a remarkable entitlement: It gives a private entity, a public employees union, "the power, in essence, to tax government employees." The WEA's complaint -- a notably brazen example of the entitlement mentality -- was against the supposedly burdensome "opt in" condition placed on its exercise of that power. With understandable asperity, Scalia said: "The notion that this modest limitation upon an extraordinary benefit violates the First Amendment is, to say the least, counterintuitive."

But if you think the WEA was audacious in its argument, wait until you read the description of the misnamed Employee Free Choice Act. The bill, which has passed the House but remains stalled in the Senate (thankfully)

would deny employees the choice of a secret ballot when voting on unionization of their workplace. Instead, union organizers would use the "card check" system, which allows them to pick the voters they want: Once a majority of workers -- exposed one at a time to face-to-face pressure from union organizers -- sign a union card, the union is automatically certified as the bargaining agent for all the workers.

The Supreme Court has said that the card-check system is "admittedly inferior to the election process." Hillary Clinton, who has given herself a makeover as a moderate, and who was elected by secret ballots, and who hopes that next year voters will use their secret ballots to give to her the power to nominate Supreme Court justices, nevertheless toes labor's line when she advocates abolishing workers' right to a secret ballot. Abolition, she says, will "create a fair and level playing field between workers and employers."

When in March the House passed card-check legislation for unpersuasive unions, a principal sponsor was Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), who in 2001 wrote, with 15 colleagues, to Mexican officials, on behalf of the rights of Mexican workers, insisting "that the secret ballot is absolutely necessary in order to ensure that workers are not intimidated into voting for a union they might not otherwise choose."

What a stunning hypocritical position.

Make no mistake, were it not for public employee unions, like teachers' unions, most labor unions in the United States would be dead or such a minor political force as to be just another interest group trying to maintain its position and achieve its goals. But the unions carry a great deal of political power, power that is out of balance with their membership, for exactly one reason--they coerce, not persuade, people into behaving according to their desires.