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George Will Supreme Court must keep unions in check
George Will is a nationally syndicated columnist.

   Democracy is rule by persuasion, but the unpersuasive often try to coerce the unpersuaded. Recent days have provided two illustrations of this tendency, both of them pertaining to labor unions, whose decades of declining membership testify to their waning power to persuade workers that unions add more value to workers’ lives than they subtract.
   Failing unions, like failing industries, turn to government for protection in the form of coercion. Failing industries have traditionally sought corporate welfare in the form of tariffs (coercion of consumers). Unions seek laws to confer what their persuasiveness cannot convince people to consent to.
   Last Thursday, the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 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.
   Many states, including Washington, allow “agency shop” agreements whereby unions can levy fees on public employees who choose not to join a union but are represented by the union in collective bargaining. Thirty years ago the Supreme Court held that nonmembers cannot be forced to pay the portion of union fees that are used not for collective bargaining but for political activities. Often states have “opt out” provisions, whereby nonmembers are required to request that the political portion of their fees be refunded.
   About 3,500 of Washington state’s approximately 70,000 teachers choose not to join the WEA, which made opting out a tedious chore. To get their refund — about 25 percent of their fees — the nonmembers had to follow procedures detailed in six pages of arcane instructions.
   In 1992, however, Washington voters approved by referendum an “opt in” rule. Unions were forbidden to use nonmembers’ fees “to influence an election or to operate a political committee, unless affi rmatively authorized by the individual.”
   Amazingly, the WEA persuaded 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.”
   The WEA’s whiny audacity was not more offensive than the aim organized labor tried to advance with Tuesday’s march and rally in the nation’s capital. Unions were demonstrating in support of legislation with the Orwellian title “Employee Free Choice Act.” It 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 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.” Now, that is persuasive.  

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since the trade unions earlier won from the state Legislature a requirement that all public construction projects have to pay union wages (misleadingly called "prevailing wages").

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Honestly...if it weren't for the unions (PRIVATE SECTOR UNIONS ONLY), some industries wouldn't be making the money they do today. It truly does help the economic system.

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Faith a reason not
to pay union dues
   COLUMBUS, Ohio — A Roman Catholic teacher whose religious beliefs conflict with the political positions of her labor union cannot be forced to pay dues, a federal judge ruled.
   U.S. District Judge Gregory Frost’s ruling broadens the category of employees who may opt out of unions because of religious beliefs beyond Seventh-day Adventists and Mennonites.
   In his ruling last week, Frost struck down the Ohio law that held only members of religions that “historically held conscientious objections” to union membership could opt out. The judge said anyone with demonstrated religious beliefs should be exempt from paying dues to unions whose positions they find objectionable.
   The law discriminated among religions by recognizing the Seventh-day Adventist and Mennonite objections to joining unions while denying the same right to others, the judge said.

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In his ruling last week, Frost struck down the Ohio law that held only members of religions that “historically held conscientious objections” to union membership could opt out. The judge said anyone with demonstrated religious beliefs should be exempt from paying dues to unions whose positions they find objectionable.

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Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

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Some jobs, you're just told that you will be.  Guess it depends on the employer and the union.

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SUNY researchers allowed to unionize
NLRB rules students are covered under law
BY JASON SUBIK Gazette Reporter

   The National Labor Relations Board has ruled that research assistants working on State University of New York campuses, including about 500 at the University at Albany, may now form collective bargaining units.
   CWA Local 1104 Executive Vice President Kathleen Sims said her union, which first petitioned the NLRB to allow a research assistant union vote at UAlbany in 2002, plans to hold a rally at noon today, despite objections from SUNY officials, in front of the Center for Environmental Sciences and Technology Management. The building is part of the nanocollege complex off Washington Avenue where most of the research assistants work.
   UAlbany spokesman Michael Parker said the college has offered its campus center as an alternative location because the CESTM building and the land around it are controlled by the Fuller Road Management Corp. Sims said the grounds are public property and the rally will go ahead.
   “This is a rare decision for labor these days,” Sims said of the NLRB ruling. “We have a First Amendment right to be there.”
   The NLRB decision, made June 29, classified research assistants working for the Research Foundation of SUNY Sponsored Programs as “statutory employees” covered under the National Labor Relations Act, reversing a 2005 judgement by NLRB Acting Regional Director Rhonda Aliouat. She found the assistants to be students engaged in a primarily educational activity.
   Research Foundation of SUNY officials released an e-mail reacting to the decision on Tuesday.
   “We received some unexpected news last week regarding our 2003-2005 graduate student union cases,” wrote Research Foundation Vice President of Human Resources Lynn Manning. “The cases have been remanded to the [NLRB] regional office, and we are working with them to establish dates, locations in the next week or so to open the ballots.”
   Union votes held at UAlbany in 2002, SUNY Buffalo in 2003 and the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry at Syracuse in 2004 were impounded when the Research Foundation appealed earlier rulings that allowed the votes.
   “Until the votes are counted, no one knows whether the majority of students who cast ballots in these elections that occurred three to five years ago were supportive of a union,” Manning wrote.
   According to the Research Foundation’s Web site, it is not supportive of unions because if the foundation’s work force were to become unionized . . . “costs to campuses would increase substantially. Central offi ce will have to hire or contract with experts in collective bargaining and union negotiation. Additional costs for specialized external labor counsel are also likely.”
   Graduate assistants and teaching assistants, who sometimes teach classes and grade papers, have long been unionized throughout the SUNY system, but up until now research assistants who work for the Research Foundation of SUNY, which is a private nonprofit “educational corporation” created in 1977 separate from SUNY, have not been. The assistants are graduate students who apply for work on grant-funded research projects paid for in part by private corporations for whom the research may benefit. They sign patent waivers and can be fired at will by the Research Foundation.
   “There was a research assistant who testified here at Albany that said ‘I get one check from the Research Foundation and one check from IBM, and it has nothing to do with my dissertation,’ ” Sims said.
   Testimony from research assistants at SUNY Buffalo in 2003 indicates that most assistants work about 20 hours a week during the school year for between $15,000 and $30,000. Some students testified that as much as 90 percent of the research they did related directly to their doctoral dissertations, while others said it had no baring or an “incidental” relationship to their graduate studies.
   In the NLRB decision, the majority concluded that the Research Foundation of SUNY is not an educational institution and does not issue degrees.
   “Moreover, the undisputed evidence demonstrates the existence of an economic relationship between the [assistants] and the [Research Foundation] rather than an educational relationship,” wrote board members Peter Kirsanow and Dennis Walsh.
   NLRB Chairman Robert Battista dissented from the decision. He concluded that all of the assistants were doctoral candidates who “. .. must do research to get that degree, and that research must be done through the [Research Foundation].”
   The board’s decision clarifies its 2004 ruling in a case of Brown University graduate assistants wanting to form a union. In the Brown case, the NLRB reversed precedent that viewed anyone in a “master to servant” relationship to be covered by the National Labor Relations Act and established a student exemption in instances where the labor was for primarily educational purposes. Aliouat had cited Brown when ordering the union votes remain impounded.
   “What this means is there’s a new precedent in the higher education industry and that’s what really lights up my Christmas tree,” Sims said. “We are cautiously optimistic about the votes.”
   Research Foundation officials have questioned the validity of votes held among graduate students long graduated.
   “It is significant to note that the vast majority of the students who voted in the three elections at UB, UA and ESF are no longer at those campuses,” Manning wrote. “It is unknown how current students would feel about having a union representative imposed on them without having the opportunity to participate in a union election.”
   CWA Local 1104 Attorney Mark Pearce said U.S. labor law does not allow retroactive benefits to past research assistants, but also makes valid their collective bargaining vote even if they are no longer employed by the Research Foundation.
   “It would be against public policy to allow employees to be victimized by the protracted nature of the process,” he said.
   Pearce said the Research Foundation could, in effect, appeal the NLRB ruling by refusing to contract with the collective bargaining units, which would trigger an NLRB prosecution, the results of which could be appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals.