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Tuesday 9 April 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized
This is why leftists across the land were adamantly against Wisconsin becoming a “Right to Work” state: because individuals get to reveal their individual preferences and choose whether to be part of a union (or not), rather than being coerced by the state, and the collectivist unions just can’t have that. The Washington Examiner:
More than two years after Scott Walker’s showdown with organized labor in Wisconsin, the official numbers for the state’s public sector union membership are in — and they are down. Way down.
According a Labor Department filing made last week, membership at Wisconsin’s American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Council 40 — one of AFSCME’s four branches in the state — has gone from the 31,730 it reported in 2011, to 29,777 in 2012, to just 20,488 now. That’s a drop of more than 11,000 — about a third — in just two years. The council represents city and county employees outside of Milwaukee County and child care workers across Wisconsin.
Labor Department filings also show that Wisconsin’s AFSCME Council 48, which represents city and county workers in Milwaukee County, went from 9,043 members in 2011, to 6,046 in 2012, to just 3,498 now.
These numbers come from the locals’ LM-2 filings, annual reports they must make to Labor Department. They can be found here.
They show why the state worker unions and their liberal allies fought such a protracted, bitter battle in 2011 over Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s changes to the state’s labor laws. Under the old laws, state employees were obligated to pay dues to a union even if that worker didn’t want to belong to a union. Walker changed that to allow state workers to opt out of paying those dues. He also required unions to submit to an annual re-certification vote. Without those requirements, the unions have found it much harder to retain members.
Once the state can no longer force workers to pay union dues whether they wish to belong to the union or not, many of these workers (in some cases most of them) choose to tell the union to fuck off. Unions rely on state coercion; you either pay union dues or seek employment in some other non-unionized sector. If you’re an employer, you either hire union workers, or move elsewhere. Without state sponsored coercion, unions will wither and die (just as they should), and they can’t allow their partnership with the state be co-opted by the pesky individuals who would choose to have the union pound sand and stay the fuck out of their paycheck.
2013-04-09 » madlibertarianguy