Good day all. Last week, the Supreme Court made a few rulings, some of which were missed or not covered as much as you would expect. This was due to the announcement that Justice Kennedy was finally retiring after decades of screwing over the American People. One of the rulings, however, did catch the attention of the Mostly Stupid Media. It laid a haymaker to the bank accounts of Unions.
The decision reversed an earlier one, and one that was wrongly decided, that allowed Unions to force nonunion workers to hand over payments to the unions for the privilege of not starving to death. Needless to say, this drove the CommuNazis and the LameStream Media bonkers, right up until Kennedy announced his retirement. Here is what the New York Slimes had to say:
The Supreme Court dealt a major blow on Wednesday to organized labor. By a 5-to-4 vote, with the more conservative justices in the majority, the court ruled that government workers who choose not to join unions may not be required to help pay for collective bargaining.
Forcing those workers to finance union activity violated the First Amendment, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote for the majority. “We conclude that this arrangement violates the free speech rights of nonmembers by compelling them to subsidize private speech on matters of substantial public concern,” he wrote.
The ruling means that public-sector unions across the nation, already under political pressure, could lose tens of millions of dollars and see their effectiveness diminished.
“We recognize that the loss of payments from nonmembers may cause unions to experience unpleasant transition costs in the short term, and may require unions to make adjustments in order to attract and retain members,” Justice Alito wrote. “But we must weigh these disadvantages against the considerable windfall that unions have received” over the years.
Windfall is an understatement. It’s also not entirely correct. This decision affects federal employee unions. I’m not certain, but it may also affect forced payments from all levels of government employee. It has no effect on private sector unions, but they’re dying out anyway. It also blows a major hole in the CommuNazis funding. For decades, they’ve relied on the theft from nonunion workers paychecks to fund their campaigns. That funding just dried up.
Meanwhile, we have the dissenting views of the Progressive Moonbats on the court.
Justice Elena Kagan summarized her dissent from the bench, a sign of profound disagreement.
“There is no sugarcoating today’s opinion,” she wrote. “The majority overthrows a decision entrenched in this nation’s law — and in its economic life — for over 40 years.”
The original decision was wrong and now, after 40 years, it has been corrected. Perhaps one of the dumber supreme court justices might like to look at some of the decisions made regarding slavery prior to the Civil War.
“As a result,” she wrote, “it prevents the American people, acting through their state and local officials, from making important choices about workplace governance. And it does so by weaponizing the First Amendment, in a way that unleashes judges, now and in the future, to intervene in economic and regulatory policy.”
When this moonbat gets it wrong, she gets it really wrong. The fact of the matter, Kagan should never have been confirmed. She is unqualified and was appointed for one reason. To suppress the rights of the American People and render the Constitution moot.
Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor joined the dissent.
The majority based its ruling on the First Amendment, saying that requiring payments to unions that negotiate with the government forces workers to endorse political messages that may be at odds with their beliefs.
Unions say that reasoning is flawed. Nonmembers are already entitled to refunds of payments spent on political activities, like advertising to support a political candidate.
And good luck getting that money back. The unions make it nearly impossible to get refunds. This is one of the reasons the suit was brought in the first place.
Collective bargaining is different, the unions say, and workers should not be free to reap the benefits of such bargaining without paying their fair share of the costs.
Notice that the Unions always throw “Collective bargaining and free riders” into the arguments? It never crosses their corrupt minds that perhaps the reason these people don’t want to be in a union is that they don’t want to be part of a “Collective bargaining” deal? They would like to negotiate their own compensation packages.
The new decision struck down an Illinois law that required government workers who chose not to join a union to “pay their proportionate share of the costs of the collective bargaining process, contract administration and pursuing matters affecting wages, hours and other conditions of employment.” More than 20 states have laws that require such “agency fees.”
Free riding may be the wrong metaphor, Justice Alito added. Mr. Janus “strenuously objects to this free-rider label,” Justice Alito wrote. “He argues that he is not a free rider on a bus headed for a destination that he wishes to reach but is more like a person shanghaied for an unwanted voyage.”
That’s how a lot of people who refuse to join a union feel. They want to work, but if they don’t pay the vigorish to the Unions, they don’t get the job. When Wisconsin passed a law ending mandatory unionism for government employees, the rush to the doors was massive. Several union locals ended up closing their doors because the only union members left were the actual union employees who ran the local.
“The majority,” Justice Kagan wrote, “has overruled Abood for no exceptional or special reason, but because it never liked the decision. It has overruled Abood because it wanted to.”
More broadly, she wrote, the decision was one of several in which conservatives have misused the Constitution’s free speech protections to achieve political ends. “The First Amendment was meant for better things,” she wrote. “It was meant not to undermine but to protect democratic governance — including over the role of public-sector unions.”
Here’s an interesting bit of history. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Progressive’s darling when it comes to Presidents, was dead set against unionism for government employees. He saw it as both unneeded and a true threat to the Republic. In the 1980’s, he was proven correct.
In 1981, shortly after Ronald Reagan took office, PATCO decided it was a good idea to go on strike and shut down air traffic in the United States. They didn’t care that it risked public safety and was also illegal. They wanted to show President Reagan who was boss. It didn’t work out to well for them. President Reagan issued an ultimatum, and when PATCO refused to go back to work, Reagan fired the lot of them.
Wednesday’s ruling contained a final blow for public unions, saying that workers must affirmatively agree to support them.
“Neither an agency fee nor any other payment to the union may be deducted from a nonmember’s wages, nor may any other attempt be made to collect such a payment, unless the employee affirmatively consents to pay,” Justice Alito wrote.
In other words, the Union’s little game of forcing people to opt out is a dead letter. The unions now must ask for permission to loot the paychecks of nonmembers. In the past, Unions have used the “Opt out” method to screw over the nonmembers. They liked to make it nearly impossible to actually opt out. The CommuNazi Party supports this policy as well, since it was a direct pipeline into the paychecks of people who would rather hang them then support them. Well, those days are now over and not a moment to soon.
Thatisall
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