Former Union President Suggests Unions Would Be Better Off Without Forced Dues or Fees

A Silver Lining In Michigan Labor Defeat | Working Life

Former National Writers Union (NWU) President Jon Tasini is torn.  On the one hand, echoing the standard union-boss propaganda line, he labels Michigan’s enactment of the 24th state Right to Work law a couple of weeks ago as an “attack against . . . unions” and a “rollback of significant labor rights.”  On the other hand, Tasini acknowledges that in practice the new law simply means that “unions can no longer rely on an easy flow of dues money deducted automatically from wages.”  (For a copy of the entire commentary quoted here, see the link above.)

Tasini believes unions were more attractive to employees in the 1930’s than they are today.  Interestingly enough, the forced-union-dues shop wasn’t authorized by federal law until 1935, and in practice it remained relatively rare until World War II.  In this era when the vast majority of unions were voluntary, according to Tasini, “union leaders lived among the rank-and-file.  They talked to them one-on-one.  People were signed up, face-t0-face, and, in the process, they were brought into the union mission, culture and struggle.”

Today, more than six decades after compulsory unionism became the dominant form of unionism in America, things are very different, in Tasini’s view:  [A]side from a strike or a bargaining dispute, most . . . members have very little contact with their union.”  Consequently, workers have “drifted away from the union” and “stopped seeing the union as the go-to defender of workplace rights.”

One need not agree with Jon Tasini’s hard-left views on most economic, social, and foreign policy issues or with his enthusiastic support for union monopoly bargaining  in the workplace to recognize that he has a point about how forced union dues poison the relationship between Organized Labor and workers.

In reading Tasini’s commentary from the other day, Big Labor bosses and other stubborn apologists for forced union dues have to be asking themselves, “If we’ve lost the former head of the National Writers Union, how many people can we have left?”