The timing on this couldn’t be better, as the Madison protests and associated labor strife have put the power of Big Labor on display. Yet in reality the effort to make Maryland a right-to-work state like its neighbor Virginia culminated with the introduction of HB743 on February 10, before the Madison protests broke out days later.
However, this effort truly started two years ago when the so-called “Fair Share Act” was passed and signed by Governor O’Malley. It changed a standing prohibition on unions charging non-members a service fee for representation, and that effort bore fruit for Big Labor last month when just over 5,000 members of the 23,000 member AFSCME union in Maryland voted to ratify a new three-year contract which included a service fee provision. Since that group of 5,000 or so was 89% of the members who could be bothered to vote on the pact, it passed – and slapped a service fee of up to $400 on both union and non-union workers. If all 23,000 members were maxed out, this would be a $9.2 million bonanza for AFSCME – as it stands they still should rake in seven figures, with a significant portion of that ransom surely going for political purposes.
Yet one key difference between Maryland and neighboring Virginia is that right-to-work law Virginia employers enjoy. Without the advantage of a closed shop, unions in the commonwealth have found it a much tougher go and political results reflect this fact: Virginia has a Republican governor and Republican legislature. While having closed shops in a state isn’t necessarily a death knell for Republican chances – both Ohio and Michigan have a heavy union influence in their urban areas but both elected GOP legislatures and chief executives last fall – it certainly presents less of a barrier if unions are kept honest by the open shop.
This afternoon is the hearing for HB743, and we can be sure that Big Labor will have its place at the table.
Yet the battle really isn’t all about politics; it’s about the role labor unions now play in our government. This has become especially true over the last half-century as the once-dominant private-sector unions have withered away and most union organization occurs in the public sector. In the case of public-sector negotiations, it’s akin to two wolves debating a sheep over lunch: one wolf is the public-sector union and the other is the government, with taxpayers being fleeced in their role as sheep. When a group of taxpayer-paid employees negotiate with another group holding the power of taxation, it’s no surprise that both groups can find mutual benefit by picking the pockets of hard-working taxpayers.
Opening the shops is a good way to starve the beast and make the union sell itself on why they should collect dues from each and every worker for the services they do provide in negotiating wages and benefits and standing up for the worker when unfairly targeted by management. If they stayed out of the political realm and returned to their proper role as collective bargainers, their perception may improve.
But when a huge pot of money is collected, the tendency is for less-than-honest people to skim a little off the top and the tendency for less-than-principled politicians is to accept every dollar of ill-gotten gain they can get for the perpetual re-election campaign. It’s the problem we seem to have in many areas of the country, and Maryland can take a positive step in the right direction if the majority party would break their chains and stop serving their masters in fleecing taxpayers.
