Right to Work – Union Boss Says “Great Example of Naming Something”

Selected quotes from Unions fear they can’t stop right-to-work, by Sean Higgins in the Washington Examiner.

“You never say right-to-work in the union movement because it is a great example of naming something. Pretty often you cannot even explain right-to-work to union members without them thinking it sounds like a pretty good idea,” [Ben] Johnson [former Vermont State AFL-CIO and American Federation of Teachers (AFT) president]  said. Leaders struggled to come up with a euphemism that would make it sound bad.

Former AFT and AFL-CIO Union Boss sees the light and says compulsory-unionism ruining union membership

Ben Johnson “believes that security clauses have contributed to the decline of unions. In too many cases, the automatic payment system has all

owed unions to become disconnected from their members.”

SInce Obama became President through this year, six states passed Right to Work laws forcing union bosses to become responsive to members in those states.

The second major blow came when the Supreme Court ruled in [National Right to Work’s] Harris v. Quinn in 2014 that state-subsidized home healthcare workers weren’t eligible to unionize. The decision signaled that the court was re-examining old precedents regarding public-sector unions.

“I remember a conference call-in with Randi [Weingarten, AFT’s president] after Harris v. Quinn where she said we had about a year before Right to Work [principles] were applied to the public sector,” Johnson said.

That was apparently on the verge of happening in 2016 when the Supreme Court heard the case Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, which challenged the union’s right to demand representation fees from nonmembers. However, the court split 4-4 in the case after Justice Antonin Scalia died, leaving the existing precedent intact.