Union Bosses’ Propaganda Machine Is Fueled by Forced Union Dues
Two years ago this Labor Day weekend, the National Right to Work Committee released the results of a new scientific poll of registered voters on the important campaign issue of compulsory unionism.
A lopsided 82% of registered voters said they “agree” with the statement that workers “should never be forced to join a union or pay dues to a union as a job condition.”
Support for the Right to Work principle is very strong across all demographic subgroups related to age, education, marital status, political affiliation and race.
Nearly 80% of Actively Employed Union Voters Reject Forced Unionism
Most notably of all, 79% of actively employed registered voters who belong to a union voiced their opposition to compulsory unionism.
Retirees who once belonged to a union rejected forced union financial support as a job condition by a 22 percentage-point margin.
Billions of dollars in compulsory union dues and fees extracted as a condition of employment from America’s overwhelmingly pro-Right to Work union members are a key source of fuel for the largest politics-and-lobbying machine in the United States.
By their own admission, union officials who file LM-2 disclosure forms with the U.S. Labor Department spent more than $1.8 billion on politics and lobbying during the 2023-24 election cycle.
Committee Vice President Greg Mourad commented:
“A very large share of funding for LM-2 Schedule 16 ‘political activities and lobbying’ expenditures comes from union dues and fees collected from private-sector employees who would be fired for refusing to fork over any money.”
James Talarico’s Support For Anti-Right to Work ‘PRO’ Act Excites Union Bosses
Mr. Mourad continued:
“Moreover, despite scientific surveys from RMG Research and multiple other pollsters showing that the vast majority of union members support the Right to Work principle, Big Labor campaign spending benefits almost exclusively pro-forced dues candidates.
“This year, Big Labor Democrat state Rep. James Talarico [Austin], who is now in a tight race to capture the Texas U.S. Senate seat currently held by pro-Right to Work Republican John Cornyn, is a case in point.
“Union bosses love the fact that Mr. Talarico was the lead sponsor of state legislation that would have repealed Texas’s popular Right to Work law. He even went so far as to name this scheme in honor of notorious farmworker union kingpin Cesar Chavez.
“Excited by this and by Mr. Talarico’s pledge to vote for the union-label ‘PRO’ Act, which includes a provision that would effectively destroy Texas’s and every other Right to Work law in the U.S., Big Labor bosses are spending millions of dollars in union dues on schemes to help him win in November.
“They don’t care one whit that the vast majority of union members in Texas support Right to Work and oppose efforts to bring back forced union dues as a job condition to the Lone Star State.
“A portion of the dues money Big Labor is pouring into this year’s U.S. Senate race in Texas is going into efforts to change the minds of union members who favor state Attorney General and GOP Senate nominee Ken Paxton, who has pledged 100% support for Right to Work, over Mr. Talarico.
“But even if the union hierarchy can’t switch the votes of union members who favor Mr. Paxton, it can cancel them out by spending their dues money to pay for phone banks, get-out-the-vote drives, and campaign mailings that are carefully designed to raise turnout for Mr. Talarico!”
Big Labor’s ruthless determination to put even more pro-forced unionism politicians in Congress, no matter what it takes, was vividly illustrated by Maine Democrat Graham Platner’s tempestuous campaign this year for a Maine U.S. Senate seat, which ended abruptly in early July.
As Platner Incident Shows, Big Labor Will Back Anyone Who Opposes Right to Work
At the beginning of this campaign, radical union bosses like United Auto Workers (UAW) President Shawn Fain were key players in pushing the Platner candidacy forward, despite ample evidence on the public record showing that this rabble-rousing political novice was a sick individual who wasn’t fit to run for dog-catcher.
Mr. Fain and other officials of far-left unions such as the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) couldn’t have cared less about Mr. Platner’s character.
By early this year, UAW and IBEW dons knew full well that Mr. Platner had for 17 years sported on his chest a Totenkopf tattoo “strongly resembling” the skull-and-cross bones emblem worn by Adolf Hitler’s murderous SS units, only deciding to cover it up when it became a problem for his U.S. Senate campaign!
But neither that nor any of the ample additional evidence showing Mr. Platner was unbalanced at best mattered to these union kingpins, because they believed he had a strong chance of getting elected and increasing by one the number of dyed-in-the-wool supporters of forced unionism in Congress’s upper chamber.
Union Political Machine Is Even Bigger Than Union Bosses Acknowledge
“Had not an ex-girlfriend come forward with a credible accusation that Mr. Platner had raped her in 2021, at this time all of Big Labor — including the Teamsters and the AFL-CIO, as well as the UAW and the IBEW, would be lavishly spending workers’ forced dues to put him in the Senate,” observed Mr. Mourad.
“And the reality is that the total amount of dues money union bosses spend on efforts to expand their special legal privileges far exceeds even the $1.8 billion per campaign cycle reported on LM-2 forms.
“Nearly half of all unionized workers in America are government workers, and purely government unions don’t have to file LM-2 forms at all.”
Billions in Government Union Political Expenditures Get Miscategorized in LM-2’s
“Even supposedly ‘nonpolitical’ bargaining expenditures by government unions are intended to influence how public employees are compensated and managed,” added Mr. Mourad.
“That’s why all of the billions of dollars spent every year by government unions are properly regarded as political.
“Congress could make a big move in the right direction by adopting and sending to President Donald Trump’s desk H.R.1232/S.533, the National Right to Work Act.
“This landmark legislation would put an end to Big Labor’s federally-authorized power to force workers to pay union dues or fees as a condition of employment.”
This article was originally published in our monthly newsletter. Go here to access previous newsletter posts.
To support our cause and help end forced unionism, go here to donate.