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© 2011 The Union Label Blog & Grassfire Nation
-By Warner Todd Huston
A new measure has been introduced in the Michigan House of Representatives that would ban school districts from automatically deducting union dues from teachers’ paychecks and handing that money over to unions.
The practice of having state governments deducting dues automatically from state employees is quite common in northern and western states that are in thrall to the unions. It is a major payoff to unions to have governments automatically deduct dues from the paychecks of government employees, too.
It does seem odd that government is handling union dues, of course, but the reason it is done is because if government didn’t automatically deduct the dues and hand the cash over to the unions, those unions would have a harder time getting timely dues payments from members. If employees were responsible for paying their own union dues — as they should be required to do — then unions would find payment a bit less reliable than when government does the job.
Naturally, this is all a big favor, a big payoff to unions but a bad deal for taxpayers. You see, when governments remove union dues for unions then taxpayers are paying for the procedure. Taxpayers are paying for the paper work, the accounting, and all the work needed to transfer union dues from government employees to union bosses.
Unions, on the other hand, get all this banking and records keeping totally free of charge to them.
The fact is, taxpayers get ripped off by unions for the costs of the records keeping and banking efforts needed to automatically deduct union dues. In other words, every taxpayer is essentially paying his taxes to support unions in states that automatically deduct union dues. It doesn’t matter if the taxpayers is a union member or a union supporter or not, he is supporting unions with his tax dollar.
How did this practice start? Pliant, sold-out Democrat politicians that take millions in donations from unions made these laws, rules, and regulations to favor their union patrons. They did so to save unions money at the expense of taxpayers.
There is little doubt that this is a practice that should be eliminated everywhere. After all, it is not a very American practice! In fact, it goes against the sort of American principles that foster personal responsibility and fairness.
Not only should government union members be responsible for paying their own dues but taxpayers should not have to foot the bill to help union members pay their dues.
Let us hope that Michigan’s union controlled Democrats will not be able to stop the elimination of these auto deductions in the Wolverine State.
Pursuant to Governor Scott Walker’s new rules, as of Monday the State of Wisconsin is no longer taking union dues out of the paychecks of government workers. The state is also charging more for these employee’s healthcare and pensions.
Even though there is still a question open of a compromised judge’s ruling to set aside the new law, the state is surging forward and implementing it anyway. Because of the legal confusion, some cities are not implementing the law.
The cessation of the state removing union dues will be a great blow to the government unions and will save the state millions of dollars in administrative costs.
Like many states, until this ruling Wisconsin automatically deducted union dues from the checks of state employees and deposited that money straight into the union’s bank accounts. This saved the unions millions of dollars because the union did not have to pay for the administration and accounting costs of taking dues. It also made sure that the unions automatically had their dues money given to them without having to rely on the union members to write a check for dues on their own.
This was all a great boon to the unions and to the Democrats that the unions constantly gave campaign contributions to.
Now, unions will be forced to rely on the members to write checks of their own to the unions and this always results in a large drop off in union dues collected by the unions as members find themselves reluctant to pay their dues. This is, of course, why the unions got their bought and paid for Democrat politicians to make laws that forced the state to remove dues from worker’s pay checks in the first place.
But no matter that the cessation of this dues removal practice will hurt the unions — which itself is a good thing — it is a good thing that this practice has stopped for it is ultimately a very un-American practice to force the state to remove dues for the benefit of unions. It is un-American to force the taxpayers to help unions get rich and to foot the administrative costs of the policy.
So, kudos to Scott Walker. Let the unions collect their own dues.
