The Roman god Janus was known for having two faces. It is a fitting name for the U.S. Supreme Court case scheduled for oral arguments February 26, Janus v. American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, Council 31, that could deal a devastating blow to public-sector unions and workers nationwide.
In the past decade, a small group of people working for deep-pocketed corporate interests, conservative think tanks and right-wing foundations have bankrolled a series of lawsuits to end what they call “forced unionization.” They say they fight in the name of “free speech,” “worker rights” and “workplace freedom.” In briefs before the court, they present their public face: carefully selected and appealing plaintiffs like Illinois child-support worker Mark Janus and California schoolteacher Rebecca Friedrichs. The language they use is relentlessly pro-worker.
Behind closed doors, a different face is revealed. Those same people cheer “defunding” and “bankrupting” unions to deal a “mortal blow” to progressive politics in America.
A key director of this charade is the State Policy Network (SPN), whose game plan is revealed in a union-busting toolkit uncovered by the Center for Media and Democracy. The first rule of the national network of right-wing think tanks that are pushing to dismantle unions? “Rule #1: Be pro-worker, not anti-union. … Don’t rant against unions. … Using phrases like ‘union fat cats’ and ‘corrupt union bosses’ and other negative language reduces support for reform.”
And yet, SPN groups have systematically spearheaded attacks on unions and workers in statehouses and courtrooms nationwide. The Janus case, and its precursor, Friedrichs v. the California Teachers Association, represent SPN’s most audacious move yet, an effort to kneecap the unions of public-sector workers—including teachers, nurses, sanitation workers, park rangers, prison guards, police and firefighters—in a single blow.
“TRUST TEACHERS!”
On Jan. 11, 2016, about 100 people bundled in coats and mittens mill around the Supreme Court steps. They hold signs with little red apples that read, “Trust Teachers!” and “Respect Teachers? Then respect their First Amendment rights!”
From a distance, it looks like a teachers’ rally. A closer look reveals an odd array of participants. Grover Norquist, the man who wanted to drown government in a bathtub, cheerfully declines an interview as he breezes by. Daniel Turner, who worked for the education reform task force of the far-right American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), waves a “Trust Teachers!” sign from behind the podium. Near him stands Chantal Lovell from SPN’s Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a group credited with jamming a union-busting bill through Michigan’s lame duck legislature in 2012. A representative from SPN’s Arizona-based Goldwater Institute is present, as is a fellow from the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity (who also declines an interview).
The night before, SPN organized a dinner for representatives of its member groups who had flown in for the oral arguments. Among its members were the lawyers representing the plaintiffs in Friedrichs and 12 groups that had filed supporting amicus curiae (“friend of the court”) briefs. The suit was filed on behalf of Rebecca Friedrichs and nine other California teachers who wanted to stop paying their “fair share fees”—money paid by non-union members to cover the costs of collective bargaining.
On the courthouse steps, a woman with a bullhorn tries to rev up the audience. “Who do we trust?” she asks. “Teachers,” murmurs the crowd. “Who?” she yells. “Teachers!” Now they have the hang of it. The podium is emblazoned with the hashtag #IStandWithRebecca.
Friedrichs deadlocked the Court 4-4 after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, leaving the status quo of union fees in place. Expect a repeat of this courthouse scene February 26. SPN is once again rallying the troops and a #StandWithMark hashtag is already circulating.
Janus has its origins in a lawsuit filed by billionaire Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner. Rauner issued an executive order in 2015 instructing Illinois to stop collecting fair share fees. At the same time, he filed a federal lawsuit to speed the issue to the U.S. Supreme Court. Two SPN member groups—the Illinois Policy Institute and the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation—joined the suit with plaintiff Mark Janus, who makes a much more sympathetic poster child than a billionaire venture capitalist. When Rauner was found not to have standing, Janus was allowed to pursue the suit.
Janus is a child-support worker employed by the Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services. “The union voice is not my voice,” Janus wrote in a Chicago Tribune op-ed. “The union’s fight is not my fight. But a piece of my paycheck every week still goes to the union.” His lawyers will argue before the Court that if “money is speech” in a post-Citizens United world, then fair share fees are unconstitutional “forced” or “coerced” speech.
The Court decided 40 years ago in Abood v. DetroitBoard of Education that fair share fees are constitutional. The decision tried to balance the right of a union to exist against the rights of any workers who don’t want to be members. Since unions must represent all employees in contract negotiations, the Court held that nonmembers could be assessed a fee to cover the costs associated with this representation. But, the Court said, nonmembers could not be charged for costs associated with political activities. Today, fair share fees and political fees are separated. The Abood decision is not a good enough compromise for the Janus lawyers, who argue everything a public-sector union does is political.
Overturning Abood would be “a right to a free ride, nothing more, nothing less,” says Joel Rogers, a University of Wisconsin law professor. “There’s no question that it’ll have a devastating financial effect on public-sector unions, at least in the short term.
Read the rest of our special investigation in In These Times.
Well so we are now just bringing this to light. The kochs have tried to destroy Union Labor for 50 years. It has been there number one goal in life. Look back and were ever labor has come under attack you will see there finger print. Look what they did to Wisconsin. Once a proud, and great state. A Union State. A Green Bay Meat Packer Union State. They went manny years without election a Republican President. Then they elect a Scott Walker. Nothing but a yes man for the Kochs. Oh no this is not just state employees as Wisconsin has found out it is ALL UNION LABOR. Will they do the same to there beloved Packers?? They are now officially a RED state.
History repeats itself. Unions had opposition when I was still teaching, Fortunately we quickly were releaved of a superintendent and acquired others who worked with teachers, etc. I suppose it might parallel the party in power.
Not really. Democrats in power haven’t done a good job of protecting and supporting unions either.
Fascism is attractive to some. It is based on the vanishing middle class. Reforms are useless and resented. Fascists are egged on to get their revenge, but they are mistaken. The ruling class pretend that they uphold democracy while they destroy it. Violence is approved as patriotic. The ruling class create deliberate confusion. The fascists unknowingly do the bidding of the rulers. What is at stake for them is the destruction of capitalism.The answer is a united front and a revolutionary movement.
El fascismo tiene cierto atractivo para algunos. Es el resultado del ocaso de la clase media. Las reformas no funcionan y son molestas. Los fascistas son azuzados para la venganza, pero se equivocan. La clase dirigente finge apoyar la democracia pero en realidad la destruye. La violencia es aprobada como patriotica. La clase dirigente crea confusion a proposito. Los fascistas sin darse cuenta obedecen los intereses de los dirigentes. Lo que esta en juego para ellos es la destruccion misma del capitalismo. La respuesta es el frente unido en un movimiento revolucionario.
LOSING FAITH IN THE SYSTEM
1.- FASCISM IS ATTRACTIVE. Fascism is written off as little more than mob rule, terror and street violence. We must understand its virulence, its seduction and its danger. The longer the stagnation and rot of a dysfunctional democracy go unaddressed, the more attractive fascism will become.
2.-THE VANISHING MIDDLE CLASS. When capitalist democracy disintegrates, and is replaced by a naked kleptocracy that disdains the rule of law, it results in political paralysis, economic decline, hypermilitarism and widespread corruption. It pushes the middle class, the bulwark of a capitalist democracy, into the working class and often poverty. It strips workers of all protection and depresses wages.
3.-REFORMS. Reforms to address the suffering are cosmetic and useless. The people’s anger is written off as irrational or racist. The reformist mouths empty slogans about social justice and the rights of workers while selling them out to capitalist elites. The hypocrisy of the liberal class evokes not only a disdain for it but as well a hatred for the liberal, democratic values it supposedly espouses.
4.- REVENGED IS MISPLACED.The virtues of democracy become distasteful. The crude taunts, threats and insults hurled by fascists at the liberal establishment express a legitimate anger among a betrayed working class. The demoralized working class, who also find no defense of their interests by establishment intellectuals, the press and academics, lose faith in the political process. They become open to conspiracy theories. Fascists direct this rage and yearning for revenge against an array of phantom enemies, most of them scapegoated minorities. Fascism becomes an asylum for all the politically homeless, the socially uprooted, the destitute and disillusioned. …
5.- LIP SERVICE TO DEMOCRACY. The ruling class are forced to at least flirt with the revolutionary proletariat, even though they may not have any sympathy with it. Democracy is thereby replaced by a hypernationalism that divides the population not by class but between the patriotic and the unpatriotic. National and religious symbols such as the Christian cross and the national flag are fused under fascism.
6.- VIOLENCE IS APPROVED. Fascism offers the dispossessed a tangible enemy and the right to physically strike back. Those inaccurately demonized as responsible for a nation’s decline become social pariahs. The stigmatized—intellectuals, liberals, gays, feminists and dissidents, are attacked as the embodiment of the disease that has destroyed the nation and will be exorcised by the fascists. The instrument to achieve the fascist ideal is a strong and authoritarian state.
7.- DELIBERATE CONFUSION. Violent fascist gangs are not composed entirely of ruffians of war, mercenaries by choice, and venal lumpens who take pleasure in acts of terror. Terrorist violence, together with deceptive revolutionary phraseology, link up demagogically with the needs and moods of broad masses of producers.For example, “antifa” activists and neo-Nazis who clashed came largely from the same dispossessed economic stratum. However, fascists venerate militarized force and violence, and their inability to deal in the world of ideas, nuance and complexity, along with their emotional numbness, leave them unable to communicate in any language other than threats and coercion. Institutions that seek to cross cultural barriers to communicate and understand others, are belittled and destroyed. Diplomacy, scholarship, culture and journalism are anathema. One obeys, both internally and beyond the nation’s borders, or is crushed.
8.- DOING THE BIDDING OF THE RULERS. This moral and intellectual vacuum leads fascists, egged on by the ruling class, to overreach, especially through military adventurism and imperial expansion. Their divisions foster an uneasy alliance with the capitalist elites, who often view the fascists as imbeciles and buffoons, but are used as cannon fodder in long and futile wars that drain the depleted resources of the nation while eradicating civil liberties at home. And in the end, these elites practice a brutality inside and outside the nation that is genocidal.
9.- CAPITALISM IS THE UNDERPINNING. Fascists lawmakers do the bidding of the ruling class with tax cuts, deregulation, the breaking of unions and the dismantling of institutions that carry out oversight and the protection of workers. The expansion of the military, which provides capitalists with increased profits, coupled with the expanded powers of the organs of internal security, binds the capitalist elites to the fascists. In the end, the ‘nation’ reveals itself to be the bourgeoisie; the ideal fascist state revealed itself to be the vulgar, unscrupulous bourgeois class state. …
10.- WHAT IS TO BE DONE? All those who are menaced, all those who are exploited and suffer, must join the united front against fascism and its representatives in government. That is the urgent and indispensable precondition against economic crisis, imperialist war and its causes, and the capitalist mode of production and expansionism. Only when the real and profound grievances of those attracted to fascism are addressed can they be pried from its grip. Class contradictions are mightier than all the ideologies that deny their existence. Although fascism can develop into a dangerous force for counterrevolution, the solution that does not lead backward but rather forward is not a misunderstood “freedom”, but the true freedom of equality and genuine democratic leadership within each community.