US right-to-work court case

This has some more detail: http://abc7news.com/politics/scotus-rules-states-cant-force-government-w...

There's apparently about 24 states that enforce agency fees.

A handful of states have already passed legislation that will more or less protect the status quo: https://uk.reuters.com/article/usa-court-unions-states/some-us-states-em...

To be honest until this case came up I didn't realise agency fees existed, it looks like a compromise on closed shops (i.e. not requiring people to actually join the union, but everyone has to pay fees anyway).

It only applies to government employees, so teachers, firefighters, police unions. It'd be great if police unions went bust but that's probably unlikely.

Yeah, I know that American lefties always lose their shit when it comes to this sort of thing and general "right to work" laws, saying that it means unions are effectively illegal. I have seen lots of people say that the US government is like the Nazis banning unions, and get absolutely outraged when you try to point out that not allowing people to be forced to be union members or to pay money to unions is not the same as outlawing unions and throwing all of their activists into death camps…

Also when you try to point out that the whole EU has been "right to work" since at least 1992 because of our human rights laws which ban union shops (called closed shops in the UK, which means something different in the US), and we as workers do okay, they don't seem to understand it and start getting very angry saying that you hate unions blah blah blah.

I can see that union bureaucrats won't like this as it means they will actually have to demonstrate value to members to get them to join.

A course in general this law will weaken workers' bargaining power, however bargaining power enforced by a bureaucracy backed up by laws isn't that genuine in any case. And as the teachers in the American South have shown, you don't need union recognition agreements to take action and win – if anything they can be an impediment, as if those states had not been right to work, those teachers would have all been subject to union no strike clauses, and would face discipline by the union for striking.

You think that's something? Look at the logo of this US paint company:

I can't find it at the moment, but in the court proceedings regarding this decision the union lawyers - on the union side! - argued that eliminating automatic dues deduction would result in unions having to take a more militant stand to recruit and retain members. They were openly arguing that right-to-work legislation undermined the state's interest in having dociles unions there to ensure labor peace!

Yeah that was quite a good article, although the Times balances it out with this bullshit: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/27/opinion/janus-supreme-court-scotus-af...

I imagine this is going to decimate public sector unions in the short term. Who knows in the long term. The density that they got was largely because of a political partnership with the Democratic Party. With the Democrats basically eviscerated at the local and state level, and with laws now extremely hostile to what public sector unionism has been for the last 60 years...it doesn't look good.

Surely the wildcat teachers' strikes provide some counter-balance to that view though, no? At least a cause for some optimism?

I think there were different trajectories between different states, and don't have all the variations immediately to hand, but afaik none of these strikes were what I'd call 'unlawful strikes by unions' (i.e. outside a contract negotiation or whatever). Some of them had post-hoc union support, at least one had a local union leader immediately call for a return to work. All of them were in right-to-work states where agency fees don't apply too?. So they were (very) encouraging, but whether they reflect anything positive about public sector unions is a different question.

Haven't seen any decent articles about how the wildcats actually got organised and what the relationship to the union structures was, that'd be worth doing if it doesn't exist already.

Yeah, they talk about that in the It's Going Down podcast, and basically the strike in West Virginia was originally organised through teachers' Facebook groups.

So, not having been on the ground in the teachers' strikes at all, I do wonder if there's a temptation to overemphasize the role of social media. I listened to those same interviews and whenever they mentioned those FB pages, they also mentioned the (mass?) meetings that took place alongside them. I think it could be a case of social media reflecting the reality on the ground rather than the other way around - although I guess once you get the ball rolling, a large social media presence can build a sense of momentum. And, ya know, it can help to link up militants in those early stages.

Anyway, just came across this article. If you ignore the painful liberalness of it, it does contain this interesting little fact:

"Last year, bucking a long trend of decline, union membership in the US grew by 262,000 members. Three in four new recruits were, like Motley-Gibson, under 35."

And, if that article is anything to go on, it sounds like it's the private sector that's pushing the growth in membership.

Don't recall hearing about specifically mass meetings. And I don't really know how meetings between teachers in lots of different schools could even happen if the teachers were not already in communication through electronic means? The only way that could happen would be if there were a pre-existing organisation had the capacity to do that. And while there was a teachers' organisation, it kind of seems like it grew as a result of the struggle, not that it created the struggle in the first place and had the reach to bring people together

True, I think, but it can be overstated. Under the pre-Jason-setup, now ended by the Supreme Court,unions still had to prove at least some relevance. Otherwise, it would become very easy for bosses to get them decertified, unrecognized as a legitimate negotiation force. Unions have to convince workers to vote for recognition, even those workes who themselves are not members. And those that vote for recognition - even if non-members themselves - know full well that recognition implies paying fees for union services. It is not as if the union has been stuffed through their throats (which is what the right wing Right to Work rhetoric implies). So, the simple fact that the union was recognized meant that it was felt - rightly or wrongly - that it had som,e relevance for many workers.

I agree that this is all within quite narrow boundaries. And I agree that the new situation will not be The End of the Unions,, and certainly not the end of struggle :)'

You think THAT's something? Last time I got arrested my belongings were returned to me in a bag branded 'SWP'.

So turns out it meant 'South Wales Police', but it made me do a double take.

I didn't follow those strikes very closely so I can't say. But from what I can remember, they received only very modest gains, some of which were paid for out of the coffers of state social services.