Friedrichs: Threat to public-worker unions
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Under capitalist law what was legal yesterday, in deed for the past 40 years, can become instantly il legal today. Such will likely be the outcome with re gard to the lawsuit that guts public-employee union rights, which was filed by Los Angeles school teacher Rebecca Friedrichs and nine other California teachers. Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association (CTA) is being waged with the help of several right-wing legal think-tank organizations that are in the business of advancing reactionary issues in the courts under the cloak of defending constitutional rights.
On Jan. 11, the U.S. Supreme Court during oral ar guments in the case signaled its intention to deliver a body blow to public-employee unionism nation wide. The CTA today represents 375,000 school em ployees in California. But 9 million other unionized public employees, 36 percent of all public workers in the country, will be dramatically affected if the Su preme Court’s expected May decision voids the right of unions to collect dues from all workers represented by union negotiated collective bargaining contracts.
During the hearing, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito indicated that he had the votes to overturn the court’s “historic” 1977 Abood v. Detroit Board of Edu cation decision that affirmed the right of public em ployee unions to collect an agency fee equivalent to union dues from all workers covered by union con tracts.
The Abood teachers unsuccessfully argued in 1977 that they “were unwilling to pay Union dues, that they opposed collective bargaining in the public sector, that the Union was engaged in various political and 12 SOCIALIST ACTION FEBRUARY 2016 other ideological activities that they did not approve and that were not collective bargaining activities.” They demanded that “the agency shop clause in the union contract be declared invalid under state law and under the United States Constitution as a depriva tion of their freedom of association protected by the First and Fourteenth amendment.”
The justifying language employed by the Supreme Court in the Abood decision, the abiding necessity of “stable employer-union relations” (or “class peace, ”if you please) was an expression of the relationship of class forces at that time as opposed to government largess toward unions. The 1960s and ’70s saw some 2000 militant and successful public-employee strikes, which more than doubled, if not tripled or quadru pled, teacher salaries over this period and otherwise improved both the quality of public education and the well-being of public workers, providing important and significantly expanding social services.
Public employees—previously serving as the “weak sister” of their private sector counterparts—used mil itant, repeated, and sometimes coordinated statewide strike actions to advance their cause and improve, of ten with important community support, public edu cation. They inspired an entire generation with the credo that democratic, fighting, and socially conscious unions were critical to advancing the quality of life and the public good.
In the later 1970s, Michigan teachers alone engaged in more than 300 strikes in a single year. These de cades saw an entire generation—millions of people— infused with the radicalism engendered by the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements, entering a dramatically expanding public-service sector.
(Above) Teachers demonstrate in front of the Supreme Court building for a strong union.
At the same time, the Vietnam and civil rights era saw a tripling of funds going to public education and social services. With the U.S. emerging from World War II as the pre-eminent world power, with its “en emies” and “allies” alike devastated by an imperialist horror that took the lives of 80 million people, Ameri can capitalism had virtually no competition for world markets. Untouched by the ravages of war, U.S. capi talism, whose basic infrastructure was untouched and massively expanded, experienced an explosive growth cycle that lasted well into the 1970s. Monies flowing into public education and social services tripled. It was truly an era in which both “guns and butter,” plus or minus some minor economic fluctuations, were the norm.
The previously largely non-union public sector ex perienced an unprecedented burst of unionization, in part fueled by a radicalized generation of youth get ting their first jobs and a period in which political and economic concessions granted by a prosperous and internationally dominant and unchallenged U.S. capi talism became the new norm.
History and consequences of dues check-off The ready recognition and granting of impressive contracts to public employees were accompanied by a dues-collecting system know as check-off, wherein federal, state, county, and municipal agencies regu larly collected union dues from employees and turned the funds over to the official bargaining agent—the (continued on page 10, in “What will Sanders’ supporters do when he endorses Hillary Clinton?”)