THE SOLUTION: Regular public union recertification elections.

Regular public union elections would give workers the right to elect union representation to fixed terms. Regular elections would help keep union actions in line with worker interests and lead to competition among unions. It would also help prevent backlash from union leadership in response to decertification petitions.1

WHO ELSE DOES IT? Currently, Wisconsin and Iowa require regular public union elections.

THE OPPORTUNITY: The Commonwealth Foundation recently gave Missouri a letter grade of ‘D’ regarding its public labor laws. Show-Me Institute research indicates that regular union elections need not be prohibitively expensive and offer a way to ensure that unions serve workers—not the other way around.

KEY POINTS

• Public workers in Missouri should have the right to choose who represents them.
• Regular elections would make unions more accountable to those they represent, just as regular government elections pressure politicians to be accountable to voters.
• Regular elections can be held at a reasonable cost to taxpayers.

SHOW-ME INSTITUTE RESOURCES

Policy Study: A Primer on Government Labor Relations in Missouri

Essay: The Low Cost of Labor Reform

For a printable version of this article, click on the link below. You can also view the entire 2018 Missouri Blueprint online.

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In California, where unions such as SEIU and Unite Here successfully pushed through a $15-dollar minimum wage law, the very same unions are seeing a backlash after workers discover they’re left out of the deal. It turns out these unions also pushed through exemptions to the minimum wage for unionized workers. Now businesses have a choice of paying $15 an hour for a nonunion worker or about $10 an hour for a union worker. A clear incentive to buy union labor.

Needless to say, workers feel betrayed. Alicia Yale, 42, a waitress at a hotel in Los Angeles and a mother of two children, is critical of the union’s policy.

"Why is it more of a benefit to be in a union? The union isn't really doing anything for us," she told the LA Times. "It's completely upside-down. They want to pay us less than the minimum wage… We should get the raise just like everybody else does."

From a union executive’s position, advocating lower wages for union workers may make a lot of sense. True, your members get paid less, but if the end result is more union workers, that will translate to more union dues.

Here in Missouri, union money is still going to the $15 minimum wage campaign. One of their slogans is “$15 and a union.” Union workers who are part of their campaign might want to ask their union’s executives for some clarification: “Will I be cut out of this deal, like union members in California were?”

The post When Unions Bargain for Lower Pay appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Several union contracts allow the union to demand fees from employees as a condition of employment. There’s also case law that allows unions to force employees to pay agency fees. (See Schaffer v. Board of Education of the City of St. Louis.) Perhaps there’s an argument this case should be overturned, but for now it’s law.

So then why the confusion?

The issue came up in a recent hearing on a bill that would increase the transparency of government unions. In the hearing, Clark Brown, an executive with SEIU, seemed to imply there were no forced dues clauses in state contracts. The Kansas City Star also repeated the misconception in a recent article.

It is true that some unions do not have a forced payment clause in their contract. Workers covered by these contracts can choose whether or not to pay for union membership. The fact that many state employees are not currently forced to join a union may be the reason why many people believe Missouri government workers have “right to work.”

I can understand why many, including the Kansas City Star, would be confused by this. But SEIU should know better. It’s a little complicated, but in essence, at least two of their state contracts (here and here) include a type of forced-pay clause. Make no mistake: Although there is variation among different contracts, some Missouri public-sector workers can be forced to pay for union representation.

The post Is There “Right to Work” for Missouri’s Government Union Members? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

So how low cost are union elections? If the state contracts out with a company that specializes in providing elections, the price tag could be less than 1% of union dues.

When Wisconsin contracted with the American Arbitration Association (AAA) to provide union elections for its public employees, the cost was about $1.50 per voter per election. AAA is a well respected arbitration firm, but there are other options. For example, a service called “Election Buddy” by Event IQ, Inc., conducts elections for Harvard and Yale Universities and thousands of other companies internationally for approximately 9 cents per voter. $0.09 to $1.50 is a wide range, but even at the top end of that range, elections are inexpensive.

For comparison purposes, consider the dues charged to state employees by some of the major government unions. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) charges Missouri state employees $16.93 per pay period, or $406.32 per year. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) charges patient care professional employees $22.50 per pay period, or $540 per year. Even if the state contracts with a more expensive arbitration firm, rather than a relatively less costly corporate election firm, and ends up charging each union around $1.50 per voter, with an election every two years that’s less than two dollars out of the $812.64 AFSMCE collects per person during that period or the $1,080.00 SEIU collects.

Contracting out for union election is just one way of saving money. By contracting out for elections, the state will not need to hire additional staff, pay for increased travel expenses for staff conducting elections, or purchase new voting equipment. The savings will allow the state to charge a much lower fee to unions for conducting these elections, saving public employees money.

The post Just How Low Cost Is Labor Reform? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

At the time, SEIU was trying to organize Minnesota’s child care providers. When Jennifer got around to reading the petition, she realized that that it wasn’t about a health plan, as the man had told her, but part of a union organizing drive. Jennifer had been lied to.

Jennifer refused to play ball. Sometimes organizers tried to intimidate her. She recounts organizers following her to her car in an effort to show her that she was being watched. However, after she spoke out, most of the intimidation stopped. Eventually the Supreme Court affirmed the right of private care providers not to be forced into SEIU with the Harris v. Quinn decision.

In Missouri, we’re seeing similar stories coming out of SEIU organizing campaigns.

Take Mark Manteuffel, a biology adjunct at Washington University. St. Louis Public Radio reports this story about an SEIU organizer showing up at Mark’s doorstep and approaching his wife:

“They were just very pushy and rude,” Manteuffel said of the union representatives, “demanding my cell phone number. And they didn't introduce themselves first off, they just approached her and asked for me. So she stood back and asked them who they were and why they were looking for me. And she said that I would contact them if I was interested after they introduced themselves.

“The second time, the person said that they would show back up again, and she said no, he will contact you if he's interested. And they kind of huffed and puffed and said again that they would show up, and she said no, you're not listening to me, if you show up again, I will call the police and have you removed. Then the gentlemen seemed to get it.”

The campaign to organize Missouri’s in-home health care attendants is another front where SEIU has been active in our state. In 2010, the SEIU-backed Missouri Home Care Union won the right to represent all home care attendants despite receiving votes from less than 16% of attendants. Since then, the union has sought support from attendants who aren’t already members.

I’m hoping that the tactics used in Missouri don’t get as bad as they’ve been in other places. However, SEIU is not a member of the AFL-CIO and doesn’t always play by the same rules as an AFL-CIO union. For people who feel they’ve been targeted or persecuted for resisting SEIU’s organization drives, speaking out might be the best defense.

(Ms. Parrish is pictured above telling her story at an event sponsored by the National Right to Work Foundation. You can watch her presentation here.) 

The post Standing Up to Hardball Tactics appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The study highlights several recent cases where a union executive got caught using the union’s coffers as a personal slush fund. In one case, a Service Employees International Union executive used the local he ran to procure lucrative contracts for family businesses. He also spent hundreds of thousands of dollars of union dues each year to maintain a posh Los Angeles lifestyle: using union funds to attend a Four Seasons Resort golf tournament, spend big at a Beverly Hills cigar club, and have expensive meals at steakhouses. According to the article exposing this abuse, the average employee represented by this union earns about nine dollars per hour.

In another case, a reporter for the Kansas City Star uncovered a culture of excess at the top echelons of the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers. The executives at this union, often family members of one another, typically made six-figure salaries, enjoyed first-class travel on private jets, flew to destinations like Paris, Marco Island, and Alaska, and had an executive suite at the Kansas Speedway. All on the worker’s dime.

In the cases highlighted in the study, the abuse of union funds was discovered after journalists reviewed a union’s financial disclosures. Financial transparency allowed union members to find out something was wrong and make the appropriate changes to leadership.

Government workers deserve the same protections as members of private-sector unions. Right now state and federal law allows government union spending to remain hidden. If a union executive representing government employees—like firefighters, teachers, or state employees—is using union funds for personal gain, there is little we can do to uncover it.

The post New Study Shows Benefits of Union Transparency appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

I previously wrote about the government union transparency gap and a bill addressing it, but if you are a government worker subject to union representation, not knowing where your dues go is only part of the problem. In many cases, you also have very little say in who represents you, and you have no recourse to ensure that your voice is heard. That’s why we need reform that would give all unionized public employees the ability to vote in regular union elections.

Consider the example of personal care attendants enrolled in the state’s consumer-directed health care program. Attendants get paid out of a state-managed program to take care of home-bound Missourians. In 2009, the attendants had an election to determine whether they would all be represented by the Missouri Home Care Union, a joint local union affiliated with both AFSCME and SEIU.

Out of 13,151 eligible voters, only 2,085 voted for the union. According to the state board running these elections, 294 ballots were challenged and 1,405 voters voted against the election. The challenged ballots plus the number of votes against the union were not enough to affect the outcome of the election. So in a low-turnout election with hundreds of challenged ballots, less than 16 percent of personal care attendants were able to force union representation on every other person enrolled in this program.

You might think, “Well, that’s just democracy. If you don’t vote, you deserve the representation you’re given.” The problem is that after a one-time election there will not be another election unless workers organize and go through a notoriously difficult decertification process. Depending on how a union contract is written, the union may even sue workers for trying to decertify the union or supporting another union. There’s nothing democratic about voting for a representative once and then being stuck with the results indefinitely.

If public employees are going to be subject to union representation against their will, then they at least should get a regular vote so that they can hold their union accountable. The Missouri Legislature has a bill, SB 549, that would require these regular elections. Regular union elections could help ensure that public employees, like teachers, police, and firefighters, are only subject to unions that work for them.

The post Bill Would Give Workers a Vote appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The post In Support of Workers’ Free Speech Rights appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The substantive question addressed in the Court’s opinion really boils down to this: should the burden be on a public employee to opt-out of an automatic salary deduction program whose proceeds could fund a union’s political activities? Or should the burden be on the union to get employees to opt-in? Are these “free speech dollars” taken from the employee’s paycheck presumptively the employee’s, or presumptively the union’s?

It appears the Court sees those dollars as presumptively the employee’s. Justice Samuel Alito, writing for a 7-2 majority, articulated the problem inherent in these opt-out arrangements very clearly:

Unless it is possible to determine in advance with some degree of accuracy the percentage of union funds that will be used during an upcoming year for chargeable purposes — and the SEIU argues that this is not possible—there is at least a risk that, at the end of the year, unconsenting nonmembers will have paid either too much or too little. Which side should bear this risk?

The answer is obvious: the side whose constitutional rights are not at stake.

Protecting the First Amendment rights of all of Missouri’s citizens is an issue that should always be of great import to the legislature. Allowing public employees to specifically opt-in, rather than opt-out, to support a union’s political activities would reaffirm this purpose.

More generally, public-sector unions pose a different set of fiscal and philosophical problems that private-sector unions do not, and those problems are related to the speech issues in play here. Public-sector unions can oftentimes choose, in fact or in practice, who will be across the table when they negotiate their contracts. Their political activism and power allows them to negotiate sweetheart deals that private-sector employees could never obtain, and taxpayers end up picking up the bills for those deals.

That is one of the reasons Missouri’s pension obligations are so foreboding (see the study we released addressing the issue). Private-sector unions are (usually) circumscribed in their negotiating power by the health of the companies with which they work. Public-sector unions are not as constrained and can simply work to vote in representatives — on school boards, in fire districts, and elsewhere — that will generously spend other peoples’ money on them. That power is in no small part underwritten by the unions’ ability to directly draw money from employee salaries and, I believe, in violation of the free speech rights of many public employees.

Thus, on both free speech and fiscal grounds, it is eminently appropriate that the Missouri Legislature would step in and reassert that public-sector union power has limits. High among those limits is the First Amendment rights of those the state employs. Employees who want to donate to the union’s political activities should be able to donate to them as they would choose to donate to any other organization, but the state should presume that those speech dollars are the employee’s first, not the union’s.

A Knox-informed reform that would reassert the rights of public employees would be a modest one, but it would effectively hit at the larger problem of the special deals that public-sector unions get which private-sector unions and the non-unionized could never leverage. Such a change would be a positive step for the state and its employees, both fiscally and constitutionally.

The post Opting-In, Opting-Out – And Burdens On Free Speech appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

An’ everybody’s doing
Just what they’re told to
An’ nobody wants
To go to jail!

I share the concerns of some that civic discourse is being harmed by the tone of these meetings. However, I think that the people saying this are longing for a day that never was — or, at least, that ended a long time ago. Political town hall forums (THF) have usually been meaningless dog-and-pony shows that accomplished absolutely nothing, and now they are shouting matches that at least accomplish the goal of letting officials know some people are angry out there. I don’t know whether it’s better or worse than before, but let’s get rid of any idea that, pre-2009, some congressman’s THF was a model of debate, wit, and education. (There are some exceptions to that, however. Kurt Odenwald used to have very good THF’s, with an open opportunity to speak to him.)

It is very interesting to see Rep. Lacy Clay largely blame unions for the recent unfortunate events in Mehlville. I have attended events (although not recently) where the SEIU showed up with the intent of disruption. It can be very intimidating. I mean, not to me, because I am a total badass, but, you know, to other people.

(Note: I can’t find the free version of the 2001 Post-Dispatch article about my fight, so I have to link to the Salon article about another one.)

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