Mark Janus got tired of being made to pay $45 a month to a union he didn’t belong to and didn’t believe in so he sued. The Supreme Court just sided with him and now labor contracts all across the country that included clauses requiring non-union member workers to pay “fair share” fees to the union.

It also means that public sector labor unions are going to be forced to offer their members enough visible benefits to make their members want to remain members and non-members want to become members. My guess is that Mr. Janus was not seeing $540 a year worth of benefits.

And if my money was going to a political party I would not see that as a benefit. Evidently that is what was happening.

The court’s ruling effectively makes the nation a “right-to-work” zone for public-sector unions. It means unionized government workers looking for a temporary boost in their paychecks may leave the organizations. The Democratic Party also might lose crucial campaign dollars from one of its most reliable institutional donors.

Source: How SCOTUS ruling on labor unions in Janus vs. AFSCME could upend politics in Pennsylvania – Philly

I thought those “fair share” fees were supposed to cover administrative costs of the union only, not political contributions. In fact:

Justice Elana Kagan, writing the dissent, cited a 1977 court precedent that found the fees did not abridge free speech because they “could not go to any of the union’s political or ideological activities.”

Evidently, that isn’t the case if the authors of the article are concerned about the Democratic Party losing crucial campaign dollars due to this ruling.

People need to understand that unions offer a product and that product needs to compete with all the other expenses a worker has. If that product offers benefits equal or exceeding its cost people will join the union to receive their product. If it doesn’t they won’t. It is wrong to mandate that the union’s product be bought.