The Patriot News reports “[a] group of Pennsylvania Turnpike employees has filed suits in federal court against the International Federation of Teamsters locals that represent them, arguing the unions are improperly collecting dues from them.”
Pennsylvania does not have a Right to Work law protecting a worker’s right to decide for him or herself whether or not he or she wants to financially support a labor union. Therefore, under the agency-shop agreement in place at the Turnpike, the Teamsters are permitted to collect dues from all employees, whether or not they belong to the union.
But under the Supreme Court’s Beck decision, nonmembers are supposed to be entitled, at least, “to see an audit proving that none of the compulsory dues money they are forced to pay is used for political contributions, organizing activity or the like.”
This doesn’t appear to be happening.
As Stefan Gleason, Vice President of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, points out, “In their lust for forced dues revenues, Teamsters union officials are trampling upon the rights of the very employees they claim to represent.”
Lord Acton, a British historian of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was right when he observed, “Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
The government granted combination of monopoly bargaining power and the ability to forcefully collect money from members and nonmembers alike is a threat to the freedom of every working American.
“Hats Off” to the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation for standing up for the rights of these union nonmembers subject to forced-unionism coercion.
We look forward to the day when all of Pennsylvania’s workers can share the protection of a state or national Right to Work law.
Mike Ferguson from the "Mark Ferguson in the Morning Show" and National Right to Work Committee president Mark Mix discuss the supply chain issues that are being caused by union bosses who refuse to back port automation...
Now there are 107 Congressional Co-Sponsors of the National Right to Work Act. There are 87 co-sponsors in the U.S. House of Representatives and 20 co-sponsors in the U.S. Senate!
No union, but especially not one with multiple top officials convicted in federal court of accepting bribes and embezzling workers’ dues money, should be allowed to impose unionization on workers by colluding with company officials to bypass a secret ballot vote. That’s why it is critical that any state incentive package includes a condition that the decision over whether to unionize the proposed Ford-SK Innovation Western Tennessee plant be made with workers having the full protection of a federally supervised secret ballot vote, and absent any backroom deal between company and UAW officials.