This week the House and Senate Labor Committees passed HB 1575/SB 5623, legislation that includes a laundry list of union giveaways designed to provide a leg up in the post-Janus world.   The U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in the Janus case ended the forced unionization of public sector employees, giving every worker in the nation the freedom to choose whether to pay a union for representation that many do not want. 

It appears as though the goal of HB 1575/SB 5623 is simply to make it more difficult for public employees to exercise their new First Amendment right to stop paying a union for representation they do not agree with or want.  And conversely, to make it easier for government unions to continue collecting payments, even if the worker objects and seeks to exercise his Janus rights.

The bills included is a requirement that public employers “rely on information provided by the exclusive bargaining representative regarding the authorization and revocation of [union] deductions.”  This means government employers would not be allowed to respond to an employee’s request to quit paying their union. Such directives could only come from the union.  If the worker tells their employer they want to exercise their Janus rights and stop their union deductions, it means nothing until their union gives the green light.  If the union says the deductions have not been properly revoked, the employer must continue collecting the dues and it’s up to the worker to figure out how to take on the union so they can keep their own money. 

This can be a frustrating (and futile) experience for workers, thanks to misleading, and sometimes downright deceptive, union tactics that rely on workers signing authorization forms that include fine print locking themselves into paying the union for at least a year and limiting to a few days each year their ability to revoke the authorization to deduct union dues.

There’s more.  HB 1575/SB 5623 would make it easier for unions to get that worker authorization they need to deduct dues, scrapping the current requirement that the worker agree to the deduction in writing and instead allowing such authorization to be in the form of electronic or “recorded voice” authorization.  Meanwhile, workers could only cancel the collection of dues by submitting, to the union, a request to revoke authorization for dues deductions in writing.

And clearly reinforcing unions’ use of those misleading authorization agreements, the bill makes clear that workers are limited to exercising their Janus rights only “in accordance with the terms and conditions of the authorization.” This means any authorization workers signed that included fine print at the bottom locking them into paying the union for a specified amount of time, and restricting when they can revoke that authorization, takes precedence over any of those pesky Janus rights.

The restriction on when and how a worker can exercise their Janus rights is as much a violation of their constitutional rights as requiring nonmembers to pay agency fees.  In both cases, workers are forced to subsidize speech with which they fundamentally disagree, either directly or through rules deliberately constructed to make it difficult to stop payments.

Finally, HB 1575/SB 5623 would lower the threshold a government union must meet in order to be certified as the exclusive representative of a bargaining unit.  Currently unions must provide “showing of interest” cards from 70% of the workers in a bargaining unit; under this bill that threshold would be reduced to just 50%.

As I noted in my testimony against the bill, creating a complex system that makes it more difficult for public employees to exercise their Janus rights and traps them into payroll deduction authorizations does not serve the interests of labor unions, public workers or our government.

A better policy to strengthen unions after Janus would be one suggested by noted pro-labor activist and writer, Chris Brooks: “Let’s stop looking for shortcuts to surviving Janus, and get down to the hard work of organizing.”