Captive Workers Were Forced to Fund Harris-Walz

Union Households Lopsidedly Refused to Back Big Labor Candidates

Despite being backed by almost all Big Labor bosses, 2024 Democrat presidential standard-bearer Kamala Harris ultimately corralled the votes of barely more than half of union household members nationwide, according to the widely cited National Election Pool (NEP) exit poll. 

Since November, many pundits have publicly asked why the share of union rank-and-filers voting for the candidates promoted by the union hierarchy has shrunk so much over the past three decades. 

(In 1992, for example, NEP precursor Voter Research & Surveys found Big Labor-backed Democrat Bill Clinton carried union household voters by 31 percentage points over GOP nominee George H.W. Bush, nearly quadruple Kamala Harris’s NEP-reported eigh-percentage-point margin over Donald Trump.) 

But few if any media pundits have noted that roughly six out of 10 union household members in 2024 either cast their ballots for a presidential ticket opposed by Big Labor, or opted not to vote in the contest.

Lies Help Union Bosses Grab Compulsory-Dues Dollars For Electioneering, Lobbying

Regardless of which presidential ticket, if any, union members, their spouses, and other members of their households voted for, Big Labor bosses overwhelmingly backed Ms. Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, with money extracted out of those unionized workers’ paychecks. 

Federal law grants union officials extraordinary power over individual workers. Except in Right to Work states, the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) authorizes Big Labor to get private-sector employees fired for refusal to fork over union dues or fees. 

But in theory, Big Labor shouldn’t be able to get away with using workers’ forced-dues money to cancel out the workers’ own votes, or to help one candidate when the workers favor none. 

Under court precedents won by National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation attorneys, forced dues-paying employees who never joined or resigned from a union have the right to pay a forced, but reduced, union fee rather than full compulsory dues. And objecting workers’ forced fees are not supposed to be spent on politics. 

However, as countless Foundation cases show, union bosses routinely lie to workers.

Workers are falsely told that they have to join the union, or can’t automatically resign. Time and again, workers are tricked by such falsehoods and pay full union dues to save their jobs. 

“By exploiting its legal privileges and intimidating workers, Big Labor was able to pour, by its own admission, roughly $1.6 billion into electioneering and lobbying in the 2021-22 campaign cycle. The actual figure is likely well over 10 times that much,” noted National Right to Work Committee President Mark Mix. (Mr. Mix is also president of the Right to Work Foundation.) 

Only About 40% of Union Household Members Voted For Harris-Walz in 2024 

Roughly 47% of the estimated 29.8 million union household members who voted in the 2024 presidential election did not vote for the Big Labor-backed Harris-Walz ticket. 

And according to a back-of-the-envelope post-election analysis made by the National Institute for Labor Relations Research, roughly 25% of union household members who were eligible to vote did not cast any ballot at all. 

“That means only about 40% of all adult union household members actually voted for the Harris-Walz ticket,” Mr. Mix pointed out. 

“But the vast sums of unionized workers’ forced dues and fees funneled into the Harris-Walz campaign served as the principal bulwark for the ticket’s election all the same. Had an additional 118,000 votes in three battleground states gone the other way, this Big Labor scheme would have succeeded. 

“Many Americans who aren’t themselves particularly political might wonder why union bosses would spend unionized workers’ forced-dues money on candidates for whom the union rank and file and their families would never vote. 

“First and foremost, the answer is that union bosses are determined to elect and reelect politicians who oppose Right to Work protections for employees.”

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