The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Unions will lose money, not clout
A large state workers’ union braced for the worst on Thursday morning, a day after the U.S. Supreme Court decided that public employees can opt out of paying union dues and still enjoy the same pay and benefits as full-fledged members.
A typical state or municipal employee can now save between $600 and $750 a year just by declaring nonmembership in the union, under the new law of the nation. And under state law, the unions must still represent those workers in grievances and disciplinary hearings, just as if they were members.
The anguishing was underway. How many state and municipal union members, including local teachers, would opt out in that first full day after the bitterly contested, 5-4 ruling? One union went so far as to set up a phone bank to field the calls.
Not a single person called to quit, according to a source at the union, who did not agree to identify the organization.
At another large public employees union, AFSCME Council 4, exactly one duespaying member called just to ask a few questions, not to quit, said Jody Barr, executive director of the union, which represents 30,000 state and local government workers in the state.
That’s good news for the unions. But over time, the labor coalition that represents state workers will see defections. The question is how many, and, more importantly, what will the lost revenue and decreased active membership mean for bargaining rights, pay and benefits for public employees in Connecticut?
At stake is pay and benefits for all working people, as unions set a standard for labor markets.
My best guess after talking to a lot of people and looking at state and national trends: The Connecticut state employee unions will lose 10 percent to 15 percent of revenues as a result of the Janus v AFSCME Council 31 decision.
That translates to somewhere between $3 million and $4.5 million out of the roughly $30 million the unions now collect through state payroll deductions.
And to make matters worse, from now on the unions will have to spend significant time and money just holding onto the workers they have, as anti-union groups lobby workers to quit.
But the unions may lose no clout in the bargain. Barr, who was elected in April to succeed the retiring Salvatore Luciano at AFSCME Council 4, sees a boost in union power.
“They poked a bear. They’re making us change the way we’re doing business,” Barr said Friday. “The members that are organized, they’re fired up. I think you’re going to see a more concentrated, more active group of people throughout the state that are organized. I think it’s going to make us stronger by the time we’re done.”
Part of the work at AFSCME and other unions is restructuring for added efficiency, as most industries have already done for decades. With guaranteed revenue and no real competition, public employee unions have had less urgency to reorganize and trim costs — though Connecticut, for example, has eliminated about 6,000 union positions in Gov. Dannel P. Malloy’s constant cost-cutting for eight years.
That means anything from getting by with fewer copying machines to sending smaller groups to conferences to restructuring the way statewide unions serve local affiliates and members, Barr and others said.
Barr sees a smaller number of defections — around 5 percent, he predicted, acknowledging there’s no way to know in advance.
“But we are actively working on organizing to more than compensate,” he said.
Wisconsin or Michigan?
The unions’ argument: Collective bargaining only works effectively when members stick together. Yes, an individual can save money by defecting, but if everyone did it, or even a large percentage, the unions, and those very workers, would lose money, benefits and clout.
So it’s more game theory than labor politics. Who’s going to defect in this game of chicken? That depends on the culture in each state, and in each union.
Wisconsin is the nuclear meltdown example. After Gov. Scott Walker and a right-leaning Legislature stripped public emploees of bargaining rights in 2011 and gave them the option to bow out of membership dues — as the Supreme Court just did for the entire nation — membership fell by more than half.
On the other hand, in Michigan, the giant UAW union lost virtually no public employees after that state instituted “right to work” laws that let workers opt out of dues.
Connecticut, with one of the highest union membership rates in the nation and a strong tradition of workers’ rights, has a solid collective bargaining culture that will stanch defections.
Anti-union groups’ argument: Hey Connecticut government workers, you don’t need unions to get a fair shake. You should relish your independence and free choice.
“The disproportionate power of government unions is hurting the people of Connecticut as demonstrated in our studies,” said Carol Platt Liebau, president of the Yankee Institute for Public Policy Studies, an anti-union, libertarian think tank and advocacy group.
That includes a contention in a 2015 report that state employees made 25
percent to 46 percent more in pay and benefits than their private-sector counterparts with equal experience and education.
If that’s true, it’s less so with each newly created tier of state employees — Malloy has twice cut benefits for new tiers. And anyway, isn’t that a credit to unions?
The assumption that the state would mistreat workers without unions is false. That’s partly true in tight labor markets for some jobs, certainly. “We value our employees,” Liebau said. “We want them to be treated fairly.”
Under attack
That argument is bought and paid for by right-wing groups such as the Freedom Foundation and the Koch family, representing huge wealth, union leaders say.
Dan Livingston, a lawyer and chief negotiator for the state employees’ bargaining coalition, sees a widening gap in wealth, and two great institutions that uphold power and wealth for working families: Defined benefit pensions and unions.
“Just coincidentally, those are the two institutions that are under attack from the right-wing around the country,” Livingston said.
The Janus decision, which targeted unions in a political way as punishment for unions’ support for Democrats, puts that standoff on steroids.
Barr, at AFSCME, said there’s already evidence of anti-union groups lobbying hard in Connecticut.
“They will spend more money trying to get our members to leave than we will lose.”
Crunching numbers
Other labor leaders declined to predict the numbers of defections in the ranks. Here’s what we know, and how I landed on the 10 to 15 percent estimate.
Union members have long had the option of bowing out of full membership by paying what’s called agency fees instead of dues. The fees represent the amounts the unions spend on representation, not political activity and lobbying.
Here’s the catch: In Connecticut, agency fees are just about the same as dues for most unions, maybe 10 percent less. Political activity is financed through separate, voluntary contributions. So no one has had much of an incentive to opt out — until now.
In a recent two-week pay period, in April, to reflect full staffing at public colleges, the state paid 51,148 unionized employees, parttime and full-time included. Of those, 7,145 were agency fees payers, not full members.
That’s 14 percent. All of them, and some others, will opt out of paying dues, right?
Not so, union leaders say. “Most of them don’t know that they are fees payers,” said Meri Williams, a secretary at Western Connecticut State University and vice president of AFSCME Local 562, which represents clerical workers in Norwalk, Stamford, Danbury, Waterbury and parts of Litchfield County.
Their paperwork was perhaps mishandled, or they transferred jobs or any of a thousand other reasons. No one ever corrected the errors because it basically didn’t matter.
Now, it does.
So let’s say half of the 14 percent of agency payers rejoin the union fold.
There will still be some defections just on financial grounds. That’s all the more true since an agency payer — now a nonmember on a free ride — can keep his or her status secret from coworkers.
But not from the unions. Barr said he was able to reduce the number of agency fee payers to fewer than 10 at the union he headed, non-teaching faculty at state universities.
Reducing nonmembership
On top of that, the unions — anticipating the Janus decision for years, as two earlier U.S. Supreme Court cases signaled it — have been furiously persuading workers to sign “re-commitment cards” for union membership, and, more recently, to flip agency payers over to full membership.
“We’ve encountered people who have come to us,” Williams said Friday, “and said, ‘I’m still a fees payer, how do I become a dues payer?’ ”
I spoke with two friends who are state employees, both in the professional ranks unaffiliated with their unions other than as members. So far, they said, there’s not much evidence of defectors, not much talk of exiting.
“You know me, I buck authority,” one said. “I work for the people of the State of Connecticut, I don’t care about Gov. Malloy . ... I know I have a really good union that will back me up.”
He’d have been fired three times over the years, he said, for doing the right thing. Now, he’s a walking billboard for the union and the reason the ranks will lose relatively little.
“They protect my rights and I’m really happy about that.”