Behind key anti-labor case, web of conservative donors
Case Supreme Court will hear today could cripple public-sector unions
In the summer of 2016, government workers in Illinois received a mailing that offered them tips on how to leave their union. By paying a so-called fair-share fee instead of standard union dues, the mailing said, they would no longer be bound by union rules and could not be punished for refusing to strike.
“To put it simply,” the document concluded, “becoming a fair-share payer means you will have more freedom.”
The mailing, sent by a group called the Illinois Policy Institute, may have seemed like disinterested advice. In fact, it was one prong of a broader campaign against public-sector unions, backed by some of the biggest donors on the right. It is an effort that will reach its apex on Monday, when the Supreme Court hears a case that could cripple public-sector unions by allowing the workers they represent to avoid paying fees.
One of the institute’s largest donors is a foundation bankrolled by Richard Uihlein, an Illinois industrialist who has spent millions backing Republican candidates in recent years, including Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and Gov. Bruce Rauner of Illinois.
Tax filings show that Uihlein has also been the chief financial backer in recent years of the Liberty Justice Center, which represents Mark Janus, the Illinois child support specialist who is the plaintiff in the Supreme Court case.
And Uihlein has donated well over $1 million over the years to groups like the Federalist Society that work to orient the judiciary in a more conservative direction. They have helped produce a Supreme Court that most experts expect to rule in Janus’ favor.
The case illustrates the cohesiveness with which conservative philanthropists have taken on unions in recent decades. “It’s a mistake to look at the Janus case and earlier litigation as isolated episodes,” said Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, a Columbia University political scientist who studies conservative groups. “It’s part of a multipronged, multitiered strategy.”
In doing so, these donors have not just brought labor to the brink of crisis but threatened the Democratic Party as well.
Amid changes in the campaign finance landscape and the decline of private-sector unions, the party and its candidates have increasingly relied on major public unions for funding, including hundreds of millions of dollars in direct and indirect spending during the 2016 presidential cycle. Those unions include the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, whose Council 31 is the defendant in the Janus case.
A recent paper by Hertel-Fernandez and two colleagues may foretell what Democrats can expect if Uihlein and his fellow philanthropists succeed. It found that the Democratic share of the presidential vote dropped by an average of 3.5 percentage points after the passage of so-called right-to-work laws allowing employees to avoid paying union fees. That is larger than Democrats’ margin of defeat in several states that could have reversed their last three presidential losses.
And that is clearly on the mind of Republicans. In a recent interview, the Senate majority leader, Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, acknowledged the potential of the Janus case to hurt Democratic fundraising for the coming midterm elections. “In states where they got rid of the automatic deduction and employees figured they could keep their own money, they did,” he said. “So it could have an impact.”
Conservative groups are not alone in locking arms to advance an ideological agenda. For decades, liberal donors and foundations, sometimes working together through coalitions like the Democracy Alliance, have promoted liberal goals in a variety of ways. Some backed groups, like the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders, that used litigation to move American society leftward.
But the extent of the coordination on the right often dwarfs liberal efforts. Especially on the state level, conservative groups are “doing different things, mobilizing different constituencies,” Hertel-Fernandez said. “But they’re all working with one another. You don’t see the same thing on the left.”
As the percentage of unionized private-sector workers has collapsed in recent decades, public-sector unions, which have held steady in the mid-30s since the early 1980s, have increasingly become a target.
Conservatives chafe at the unions’ political influence, which they believe not only props up the Democratic Party but also drives up government spending and skews public policy on issues like education.
Few philanthropists have funded a more sweeping assault on labor than Uihlein, who with his wife, Elizabeth, founded a Wisconsin-based shipping supply company called Uline.
Richard Uihlein is an ardent conservative who considers many Republican office holders too moderate on fiscal and social issues, according to those who know him.
“It’s not just politics for him,” said his friend Leonard A. Leo, the Federalist Society executive vice president, who declined to offer specifics on Uihlein’s views. “I think he is philosophically attuned to conservative ideas,” added Leo, whom the Trump White House enlisted to shepherd the Supreme Court nomination of Neil Gorsuch.
The Uihleins have spent tens of millions of dollars over the past decade supporting Republican candidates and committees. That includes contributions to super PACs backing the 2016 presidential campaigns of Walker and Cruz, and at least $250,000 to help Walker survive a 2012 recall election. (Uihlein did not respond to a request for comment.)
The Uihleins appear to be preoccupied with state employee pensions and the unions that negotiate them.
“Bruce is the only one in the race who isn’t beholden to public-sector unions,” Richard Uihlein said of Rauner, the year before his 2014 election as Illinois governor, in an interview with Crain’s Business Chicago. The Uihleins gave more than $2.5 million to his campaign.
Rauner has been a major ally in the fight against public-sector unions. Shortly after taking office in 2015, he challenged the constitutionality of mandatory union fees in federal court.
By the time a judge ruled that Rauner lacked standing for his lawsuit, the Illinois Policy Institute, which drew more than one-third of its $5.8 million in revenue that year from Uihlein’s foundation, had found a viable plaintiff to replace him: Mark Janus. The Liberty Justice Center and the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, which Uihlein also contributes to, represented Janus in court.
Since then, the policy institute has sought to persuade state employees to leave their union through its mailing campaign. It said it had obtained employees’ names through Freedom of Information Act requests.
Rauner’s administration has amplified the institute’s message, and vice versa. In an August 2016 email to state workers, the administration highlighted a benefit of giving up union membership and urged workers to visit a website that would help them do so.
The policy institute soon promoted the same website and provided similar guidance in its mailings to state workers.