The Supreme Court's latest assault on labor unions is symbolic of an increasingly
hypocritical, content-light, and almost comically acrobatic approach to civil rights issues taken by conservatives.
I won't belabor (so to speak) the details of the ruling itself, which is well explained over at this DailyKos posting: http://www.dailykos.com/... . Basically, the court's conservative majority said Illinois employees who are home health care workers in the Medicaid program don't have to pay a fair-share fee in lieu of membership fees to the public employee union that's the collective bargaining unit for 26,000 such workers.
Although the ruling seems a narrowly tailored (and clearly logic-challenged) decision that won't by itself affect the broader precedent applying to most public employee unions, the move opens the door to further assaults on a 1977 Supreme Court case that affirmed the
constitutionality of such fair-share payments in so-called "agency shops."
The American Prospect summed up the court's ruling this way: "The decision in Harris v. Quinn—written by the Court’s leading union-hater, Justice Samuel Alito—appears designed to cripple unions by creating incentives for 'free riders.' "
In political context, that sentence says it all and lays out the sly hypocrisy going on here. Aren't conservatives supposed to be the consummate critics of "free lunch," "free-rider" economics, complaining about all those "lazy," "lay-about" citizens -- you know, like the alleged cheats who scam the welfare system that is now largely non-existent, who allegedly get something for nothing? Not this time!
Read on past the cloud of orange, back-room cigar smoke for the details.
Mind you, I have nothing but respect for the hard, challenging work that home health care workers provide, and the work of public employees in general. But the conservative regard for such employees seems far more situational. This time, in the Supreme Court's ruling, if you're an otherwise despised public employee or low-income worker getting what might in the conservative mind-set otherwise be perceived as a free lunch, it's okay, because your free lunch comes at the expense of a public employee union, a class of institutions that conservatives simply hate.
About 30 percent of the 26,000 home health care workers in the SEIU's Illinois state government bargaining unit aren't members of the union and don't pay dues even though they are legally entitled to benefit from the union's expenditure of time and money in bargaining collectively for better wages, benefits and working conditions on their behalf. The 1977 law, however, lets the union collect a "fair-share" fee in lieu of dues from those non-members, who would otherwise -- ahem -- get something for nothing.
And then there's the political right's puerile, all-purpose, free-speech argument.
The National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, which represented the eight non-union employees who filed the suit, made a case that public employee unions are engaged in lobbying the government, sometimes on issues that some workers oppose. The foundation said -- and five justices agreed --- that this arrangement violates the workers' First Amendment rights. That's because (are you ready?) the union speaks for them! Horrors! It's like, like... representative government! Or a club! Or a corporation!
Unions retorted that members can by existing law opt out of that portion of dues going to political activity, which suggests a much simpler way of dealing with the non-member issue than blowing up unions and moving the nation more and more towards a universal, union-less, right-to-work-for-less environment. But the conservative justices apparently were all out on a smoke break when that point came up.
Hey, Supremes: Based on your reasoning, I think my free-speech rights are violated every time a majority of other voters elect a dumb Republican legislator in the district where i live. That legislator speaks for me, and I object! I especially object because as a taxpayer I have to pay a part of her salary for the privilege of being abused and offended by her unwise votes. Also, lots of people make fun of where I live, as a result. Yup, it's true. As a US citizen, I am forced to belong to a group (Republican lawmakers) that I refuse to join or willfully support, yet they go on and on talking politics thanks to my unwillful dimes. Work on that next, whydontcha?
Okay, that was snark, right there, but the fact remains that many Americans -- by virtue of their choice of employer or their education or geographic location or the marketplace -- are obliged to contribute to all kinds of institutions they might not join if they had better choices. But where does that kind of thinking lead? Hey, there, conservative in-justices: Should I refuse to pay property taxes that go to support my local public school district because I have no children in school? Oh, wait, some of your conservative buddies already have been working to move us in that direction, so, maybe for you that's an unconvincing argument.
One more thing, relating back to the free-speech argument from the right-wing-to-work foundation. That argument specifically included a claim that the non-union home health care workers covered by the SEIU in Illinois shouldn't have any legal obligation to the union because of their constitutional right to free association. Ironically, a similar right-of-association argument have been used in a widely reported set of opposite cases in Wisconsin.
After Gov. Scott Walker (in his own words) "dropped the bomb" and in 2011 rammed through his measure all but neutering collective bargaining for most public employees in the state, several public employee unions sued. One of their arguments was that, in passing a law applying to only some unions (Walker exempted police and firefighter unions who supported him politically) and by denying the aggrieved unions the right to collect their dues through government payroll deductions (even though other payroll deductions for other unions and other types of groups continue to be made), Walker and the legislature disrupted their right to freely associate within their ranks through their respective unions. Indeed, union talk within the State of Wisconsin workplace is now, by unilateral management policy, forbidden. They can't even have space on the bulletin board by the water cooler. Because... they're unions! And so there is no free, workplace association for most unionized Wisconsin public employees, at least not any that matters.
Unfortunately and unaccountably, courts hearing the Wisconsin cases so far have rejected that particular application of a free speech argument. In a just and sane world (which we clearly do not have), the Wisconsin unions would be able to appeal all the way up to the US Supreme Court, and the five conservative, ever-so-consistent justices would be expected to agree with them, since "Free speech!" is now the standard argument employed by conservatives to justify anything they prefer to do, no matter how illogical their legal claims.
Which boils down to this underlying message from conservatives: What's ours is ours, and what's yours is ours. Also, our speech matters more than yours, as usual. So shut the frak up and get back to work. Oh, and enjoy your freedom[TM].
Thus the "winners" of the Illinois case are really the losers, effectively marginalized by the Supreme Court's bare majority to make a larger point. The justices in this latest travesty of labor law carved out a narrow, special exception for the Illinois home health workers, on the utterly bogus conclusion that this particular group of workers represented a class of worker whose pay and benefits are not really the domain of state government. But closer reading shows that to be a difference without a distinction. As Prospect.org puts it (noting delicious irony in the process):
The right to hire and fire these workers remains solely, of course, that of their home-bound patients and their families. The workers, then, are joint employees of both their patients and the state. And since the state allowed them to vote on whether to join a union, and since they voted to join the Service Employees International Union, these 28,000 workers have seen their pay doubled and have received, for the first time, health care coverage.
Wow, what a concept: Health-care workers who actually have health coverage of their own and wages beyond the minimum -- all thanks to that terrible public employee labor union who bargained on their behalf -- the union that the Supremes have now just so righteously redressed.
This ruling does maintain that "real" public employees are still subject to the 1977 ruling. But since the Supreme Court majority just narrowly narrowed that ruling on a very thinly sliced technicality, there's really no basis for believing they're going to stop carving now.
Meanwhile, the square peg in Alito's well-used Supreme Court bang-out bench goes in the round hole, every time. He just has to gavel away at it really, really, really hard -- but that's clearly where it belongs, and no one is going to tell him otherwise.
[Note: The author edited this post after initial publication, removing erroneous information relying on early, incomplete reports regarding the status of the home care workers.]