Washington was filled with lamentations and wailing over the defeat of the
McCain-Feingold but campaign finance reform isn’t dead for this year. It returns
before the House later this month, but we suspect that enthusiasm will wane when the House
version is on the table. It includes a Paycheck Protection bill, which would bear unions
and corporations from deducting money for politics from people’s paychecks- without
their written permission.
There is a standing belief in some quarters
that this is a corporate-led-effort to limit unions. In reality, union muscle has scared
away most corporations from contributing to Proposition 226, the paycheck protection
initiative on California’s June ballot. Unions, on the other hand, are likely to
spend $20 million or more-most of it of course swept automatically from members’
paycheck-to oppose the right of their members not to have dues money spent on politics
they dislike.
AFL-CIO President John Sweeney wants to talk
about anything these days-except the rights of the 35% to 40% of union members who
routinely vote Republican but nonetheless have their dues money spent on liberal cause and
candidates. In California, 97% of union political money is spent on Democrats, and many
members are fed up. "Every time I turn around they are giving money to crackpots on
the other side of some issue I care deeply about," says Bill Russell, a
Communications Worker of America member.
But there won’t be much balance about
views like this in the well funded union barrage against Prop 226. These are cases in
which corporations have required employees to contribute to a company PAC, and unions have
properly complained. Prop 226 would ban both unions and management from using compulsory
deductions for a political agenda.
Instead, the unions will argue that Prop 226
is an attempt to silence the voice of workers and to promote "a radical right-wing
agenda." Such tactics are likely to reduce the 2 to 1 support the initiative now
enjoys in the polls from both union and non-union members. It’d be nice if some
corner of the California establishment would raise the issue of compulsory paycheck
deductions for partisan politics, but don’t hold your breath.
Should Prop 226 pass, the unions have
already signaled they’ll be in court. William Gould, the pro-union chairman of the
National Labor Relations Board, believes paycheck protection itself is unconstitutional.
"Federal labor law pre-empts state law absent special directives from Congress or
overriding local interest," he told a labor conference, in a novel interpretation of
the law last month. But Mr. Gould’s NLRB itself has been the primary reason that
enforcement of the Supreme Court’s Beck decision has been almost nonexistent
for most of the past decade. That flouting of the law of the land is the direct cause of
the movement to pass these measures ending the practice of forced political deductions.
Washington state has been down this road
already. In 1992 its citizens voted 72% to pass the first paycheck protection law. The
Washington Education Association, the local NEA affiliate, soon saw political
contributions to its PACs fall to $132,000 a year from $576,000 a year after automatic
deductions were ended. This despite the fact that union membership grew by 7,000.
The WEA panicked and set up a new
dues-funded "community outreach program" to continue politics as usual. WEA
lobbyist Robert Maier admitted in a deposition that "it was an internal ploy to raise
more WEA-PAC money." In 1996, the union spend much of that money in a successful
effort to defeat a charter school initiative. Democratic Attorney General Christine
Gregoire concluded that $410,000 of the money the union spent against charter schools was
secretly contributed in violation of disclosure requirements by the parent national
Education Association.
In a settlement last month, the NEA agreed
to pay $37,000 in fines, while its state affiliate will pay a $39,000 fine, $ 20,000 in
attorneys fees and must reimburse state teachers $330,000 in dues money. This
misallocation of dues for political purpose is the largest campaign finance violation in
the state’s history and has led the Evergreen Freedom Foundation to file a lawsuit to
toughen enforcement of the state’s paycheck protection law.
When the McCain-Feingold bill was up before
the Senate, one of the big preoccupations was its indictment of independent groups that
use voluntary donations to exercise their rights of political free speech.
There’s nothing at all voluntary now about the tribune all union members have to pay
to their national leadership’s politics. It’s a subject that deserves a full
public airing when the House takes up campaign reforms later this month.