OPINION:
Given the heated rhetoric that surrounds the right to work, you might believe that the concept threatens the very existence of unions. However, as a former union president I can assure you that the ability to collect fees from people who don’t want to join the union is not only unnecessary, but that ultimately it undermines union officials’ legitimacy when speaking for voluntary members.
Ever since President Franklin Delano Roosevelt embedded in federal law the ability of unions to represent workers who do not wish for their representation and then compelled such people to make payments to the union, organized labor has grown increasingly reliant on those government-granted powers. The decline in union membership that continues unabated to this day began after unions were granted the power to collect agency fees from nonmembers, not before.
The unions’ panic at the thought of losing those fees — whether because of the expansion of right-to-work laws or due to a Supreme Court ruling in Janus v. AFSCME — is itself astounding. How can it be, exactly, that after more than a century of development, these membership-based organizations are now petrified at the notion that they’ll have to start surviving on their own membership? Good grief.
Unfortunately, the allure of agency fees distorts thinking inside unions in unhealthy ways that drive nonmembers away rather than attract them. “Why should we spend time trying to persuade nonmembers to join? We get almost as much from them anyway.” I’ve heard variations on that argument many times. Indeed. You may as well just go on ignoring them.
Agency fees cause other distortions. Since people have to pay fees to the union whether they like it or not, some of them join the union because they may as well, since they have to pay for it anyway. This creates a system built on self-deception. It is all too easy to forget people have to support the union whether they like it or not. You use the support of the members to justify what you’re doing even as you take pains to mandate the appearance of that support. Inside the union you have no real idea how many people truly want to be members, when their only choice is pay money as a member or pay money as a nonmember.
But the fundamental distortion inside unions is the idea that the true unionists know what the members’ real interests are better than the members know it themselves. Regular people tend to think of the union as something they pay dues to so they can get some paralegal help with contracts and grievances when they need it. Unionists think the union is there to raise social consciousness and build class antagonism. All too often they think that they know best.
When union officers believe they have a deeper understanding of the world than the members, it changes the way they interact with the members. At this stage the union is no longer representing members. Instead it is educating them and giving them lessons in their own morality.
I was a union president for six years and because I thought of myself as advancing revolution, I overlooked the injustice I did to my individual fellow citizens. It is unjust to take their money to support the union they don’t want to join. It is no less unjust to take their money so I can teach them moral and political lessons while pretending it’s about improving their wages and working conditions.
This notion of secret wisdom corrupts unions on a large scale. It affects who is elected as officers, the political program and the priorities of the union as a whole. As far as possible, outcomes are determined in advance on every question that matters, at every level. Then the result is called union democracy. And if you are a union officer you probably believe it is. I did.
I have never met a more dedicated bunch of people than I did working in the union, at every level. The work is difficult and demanding, and very few people would do it if they didn’t believe in its righteousness. However, the conviction that you know what’s best insulates you against reflecting morally on your own actions and it teaches you to begin assessing morality in terms of either the ends justifying the means, or even worse, of mere good intention justifying those means.
And so after almost a decade in union leadership, I came to support the right to work. Unions need to scrap the forced dues and find out who actually wants to be a member, and then they need to listen. By becoming organizations of attraction, not compulsion, union leadership would be able to not only better understand what members want and need but they would be able to make that their agenda. The reasons behind the decline of unions in this country are many and complex, but there is no doubt that if today’s unions were more in tune with their members and listened rather than dictated, then they would be more popular and successful.
• Ben Johnson is a former president of AFT Vermont and Vermont AFL-CIO. Currently he operates Progressive Labor Solutions.
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