W ILL SE AT T LE INCOME TA X BE JUDGED? [4] WORK ERS SUE T O ESC A PE UNION [5] SIDES T EPPING JANUS [10]
LIVINGLIBERTY A PUBLICATION OF THE FREEDOM FOUNDATION | SEPTEMBER 2018
THE
FIGHT GOES ON
Janus was a major victory, but the war hasn’t been won and this is no time to rest on your laurels By MICHAEL E. HARTMANN From the CAPITAL RESEARCH CENTER
Electronic Service Requested
Freedom Foundation PO Box 552 Olympia, WA 98507
I
t’s been less than a month since the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Janus v. AFSCME ruling was issued and, on paper at least, Washington’s government employee unions are already operating in the red. In the U.S. Supreme Court’s lateJune Janus v. American Federation of State, Municopal and County Employees (AFSCME) decision, the court held, 5-4, that AFSCME violated the First Amendment by compelling public-sector nonmembers to pay “agency fees” for representation to which they did not consent. It effectively made the country’s entire public sector “right-to-work” (RTW). RTW laws bar contracts between employers and unions that require every employee in a bargaining unit to pay fees to the union. Janus was a long-sought victory for employee rights and loss for Big Labor. In the wake of Janus, Missouri voters on Aug. 8, lopsidedly rejected Proposition A—which would have made it the 28th RTW state—by 67.5 percent to 32.5 percent. It was a major victory for Big Labor and loss for employee rights. True,
the public-sector employees are now protected by the Supreme Court’s ruling in Janus, but employees in the private sector have yet to have their rights restored. What to make of these two results? First, the unions’ Prop. A victory likely is a little bit of a “trailing indicator.” The effects of Janus were not yet fully in effect during the campaign leading up to the ballot initiative; much of the reported $15 million in spending that Big Labor devoted to the campaign was probably compelled to be paid by employees around the country before Janus and its implementation. Big Labor won’t have such an advantage again. Second, however, Prop. A’s result underscores the need to patiently consolidate major legal victories, like Janus—both for those organizations and individuals who fought for them (either in court or in the court of public opinion) and those who fund those groups and people. Legal victories require consolidation; wins have more staying power when the rationale behind the decision is reinforced in other legal, administrative, legislative, outright political, or even plain old policy-implementation contexts (or combinations thereof). For those who like a particular ruling or precedent, it needs to be preserved, protected, respected, and implemented, and usually, at least some want it expanded; this all requires further follow-up activity in one or more of those contexts (read: further funding). Historically, this consolidation and reinforcement of ideas supported the landmark decisions in Brown v. Board of Education, Roe v. Wade, Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, Burwell v. Hobby See CONSOLIDATE Page 10