Ok, the highlights
Fortunately, they have the support of the U.S. Supreme Court. In the 1988 case Beck v. Communications
Workers, a decision written by its most liberal member, William Brennan, the Court said it violates the First
Amendment to force employees, over their objections, to pay union dues that are used to support political
candidates or causes. President Bush’s only attempt to enforce Beck came in 1992, when he issued an executive
order requiring federal contractors to inform their employees of their Beck rights. That order was soon rescinded
by President Clinton. Since 1993, the Clinton administration, Democratic members of Congress, federal judges,
and NLRB members appointed by Clinton have been engaged in a vast ruling class conspiracy with union leaders
to keep employees covered by union contracts ignorant of their First Amendment rights under Beck, making it as
difficult as possible for them to object and recover the political contribution portion of their dues.
Beck is the labor movement’s unacknowledged Achilles heel. If the rights of employees recognized by the
Supreme Court in that decision are ever enforced, it will doom John Sweeney’s strategy of organizing the working
poor along with more public employees in an attempt to reintroduce class warfare into American life through
political campaign contributions. Beck doesn’t just make it illegal to take union dues from employees over their
objections and use them for political contributions. It says you can’t use their dues for anything other than what
directly benefits them: collective bargaining, contract administration, and processing grievances. What that means,
in plain English, is that when an employee objects you can’t legally spend his union dues for political campaigns or
for organizing other workers. The NLRB, labor’s lapdog, predictably disagrees, but its recent decision to that
effect will be reversed on appeal.
In Beck the Court found that fully 79 percent of union
dues were spent on activities that did not directly benefit the dues-paying workers. In Washington state, where
voters passed a Paycheck Protection Initiative in 1992, 85 percent of the state’s teachers declined to have their
dues spent on political contributions. Imagine what would happen to New Labor if it lost two-thirds of its revenue.
No one in Congress would ever return John Sweeney’s phone calls.
Most employees in unionized workplaces are unaware of their rights under Beck. A 1996 survey of 1,000 union
members by Americans for a Balanced Budget revealed that 78 percent did not know they had a right to obtain a
refund for that portion of their dues spent on political contributions. You can be certain that figure would approach
100 percent if they were asked about their right to refunds for dues spent on organizing.
Why aren’t companies doing more to educate their employees about Beck? Largely because it’s not in their
interest for unions to increase spending on contract administration or grievance processing, expenditures approved
by Beck. That would cause problems, possibly reduce productivity. Plus, any company that tried to inform its own
employees of their Beck rights would face union reprisals.
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"Take your weapon with reluctance. Draw it with dread. Grieve for those who fall to your bullets. But make every shot count."-Robert Shea
