The Two Faces of Janus v. AFSCME

Progressive podcaster Jonathan Tasini says it’s a disaster for unions and working Americans; libertarian legal scholar Eugene Volokh says it’s a bad decision, but won’t change much.

25 min readJul 6, 2018

The two-faced Roman god Janus was said to look over the beginning and end of conflicts — one face looked rearward, to the past, while the other looked ahead to the future. With the end of the Supreme Court’s latest session, and looming end to moderate Justice Anthony Kennedy’s career, we may be witnessing the beginning of a new era of jurisprudence.

Two years ago, the court decided not to hear the case of Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, suspending the conflict between public sector unions and their opponents in the “right work” camp. Rebecca Friedrichs was a school teacher who resented paying “agency fees” to her union. Public sector unions push for legislation in the interest of their members, such as increased teachers’ salaries. Friedrichs, however, was not a typical union member. A rare anti-union teacher, Friedrichs was recruited as an ideal plaintiff to go to court on behalf of the entire “right to work” movement — largely funded by conservative and libertarian interest groups — to argue that her free speech rights were being violated by the requirement to contribute financially to her union.

Many thought that the Friedrichs case was doomed when Justice Scalia suddenly passed away in 2016, until Trump’s election ushered in Neil Gorsuch’s nomination. The issue of public sector union dues returned to the docket in the case of Janus v. AFSCME. While the details of the case were different, the essential question was the same: do forced dues to a union constitute a violation of the First Amendment, as an instance of “compelled speech?”

A Precedent Overturned

Janus, a child protection specialist, also contested the fees his union required him to pay. Since unions often function as a wing of the Democratic party, this seems like a reasonable complaint for public sector workers who broadly oppose the Democrats’ agenda. Indeed the court had found in a previous case, Abood v. Detroit Board of Education (1970), that collecting dues from non-members is only constitutional when they are used for the sole purpose of collective bargaining, and are separated from political activism funded by member dues.

Allowing employees to opt out of union fees entirely, however, creates a “free rider” problem, in which the non-members receive the benefits of the union’s negotiations at the expense of members. Thus, the decision in Janus — in favor of the plaintiff’s right to not pay any fees — deals a hard blow to public sector unions — one of the last organized supporting wings of the Democratic Party.

Image from the Economic Policy Institute

To understand why the case was so charged, one needs to understand the shifting political landscape — specifically, the shrinking power of unions as a check on business interests. Certain subgroups of the GOP have made it their goal to “defund and defang” public sector unions — the last bastion of organized labor — so that a free market agenda can advance with less opposition. We have seen a nearly inverted relationship between the declining share of union membership and the rising share of income going to the top 10%. Whether the relationship is causal is hard to say, but the graphical evidence is compelling.

Subscribe to Jonathan’s podcast for a progressive perspective on issues related to organized labor and inequality.

Jonathan Tasini, host of the progressive “Working Life” podcast, sees this outcome as the result of a highly effective coalition of right-wing interest groups — including the Koch Foundation and the Uihlein Family Foundation — and the network of think tanks and organizations they support. Tasini links the decline in union influence over politics with the rise in inequality, and expects the Janus decision to further erode the fabric of working class America.

However, it is not only progressives using partisan arguments for unions who are arguing against the 5–4 majority in Janus.

Was the Court Wrong?

Eugene Volokh, a noted libertarian legal scholar and lead blogger at Reason.com’s The Volokh Conspiracy, co-authored an amicus (or “friend of the court”) brief in support of a government union’s constitutional right to levy fees.

The decision.

In her dissent, Justice Kagan quotes Volokh’s brief, which offers “many examples to show that the First Amendment ‘simply do[es] not guarantee that one’s hard-earned dollars will never be spent on speech one disapproves of.’”

For example, when the government taxes, it often spends the money on campaigns to promote the ideology behind a given program. In a simpler case, government grants often fund causes and forms of expression that many taxpayers do not value. These are not violations of a taxpayers free speech rights. Kagan and Volokh suggest that we might as well think of the agency fees as a tax on government workers to pay for the collective bargaining, which they must undertake with the union to determine fair pay and benefits.

This ultimately led Volokh to conclude, in the wake of the decision, that the new precedent won’t change much. After all, the government can just change its method of levying the fee to a tax — leaving union revenues unchanged.

Nonetheless, the Janus decision does seem to tilt the balance a bit further away from unions, which is why many libertarians are celebrating.

Bob has covered this topic several times in the past, including (most recently) his interview with Rebecca Friedrichs and her attorney [A Teacher’s Stand Against Her Union — Rebecca Friedrichs and Terry Pell, 6/19/2016].

Tune infor the other side of the debate as Bob interviews Jonathan, or read the transcript below

The Janus Decision: An Overview

Bob Zadek: Hello and welcome to The Bob Zadek Show, the longest running live libertarian talk radio show on all of radio. Thanks so much for listening this Sunday morning. Today we are going to have an enjoyable and informative hour. The most recent term of the Supreme Court that just ended handed down a much awaited and much anticipated, and in some circles, much-feared decision. The name of the case was Janus v. AFSCME (American Federation of State and Municipal Employees).

The Supreme Court was asked to decide whether or not public sector unions, teachers, the SEIU, and the unions that represent workers for government employment as opposed to private workers, could be compelled to pay what are called “agency fees” or “fair share” fees. The Supreme Court was asked whether a worker who didn’t want to join the union could be compelled to pay a portion of what otherwise would be union dues to support the unions’ contract negotiations and contract enforcement efforts. The issue before the court was this compulsory payment of agency fees to the union.

The argument was that if the worker was getting the benefits of the union-negotiated a contract by having a higher salary, which would benefit both a non-payer as well as the payer, we have the so-called “free-rider” issue. Therefore, the policy was that workers should not be given a free ride, and should not get the benefit of union negotiation without paying a dime.

The workers argued that was not fair because by being compelled to pay dues, they were paying for the unions to promote political points of view they did not agree with. The unions responded by saying they were only paying a portion of the dues that were allocated to contract negotiations alone.

The union claimed they were not paying for what is called “compelled speech.” Well, the Supreme Court came to a 5–4 decision with Justice Alito writing for the majority. The usual players took sides. The more conservative justices supported Alito’s position and the more progressive judges were in the dissent. That decision has caused quite a furor in the media.

This morning I have invited Jonathan Tasini, who is a very outspoken critic of Janus v. AFSCME and has long been a strong supporter of workers’ rights in the marketplace. He was a national surrogate for Bernie Sanders in the last presidential campaign. He appeared on CNN quite a bit. So, Jonathan and I will discuss the merits and the issues behind the Janus decision. We are not going to discuss all that much about the Supreme Court or the legal precedent behind it or whether or not it was decided soundly on free speech grounds. It is more interesting to discuss the issue on policy grounds. So with that introduction, I’m delighted to welcome Jonathan to the show,

Jonathan — good morning.

The Supreme Court decision was much feared in union and worker circles. There was a case called the Friedrichs case, which was heard the last term before Justice Scalia died. In fact, Rebecca Friedrichs was a guest on my show right before that. That case wasn’t decided because Scalia died and it was 4–4. So, this Janus decision is like Friedrichs reincarnated. Tell us why you have been very outspoken against Janus, and give us the big picture as to what is wrong with it on the merits. We will be discussing the case in terms of how it affects a worker’s life, and public life in America. We are not going to be discussing Supreme Court precedents. Why are you so opposed to that decision. What’s wrong with it from your point of view?

A Teacher's Brave Stand Against Her Union - Rebecca Friedrichs and Terry Pell

When Rebecca Friedrichs first started teaching in Orange County nearly 30 years ago, she was surprised to discover how…

www.bobzadek.com

Jonathan Tasini: To add one other piece of background information, this has been percolating up for several years. This looks like a grassroots uprising of individual workers who are opposed to the notion of paying union fair share fees.

But really, behind this is a well-funded campaign by frankly anti-union billionaires like the Scaife Foundation and other names that are familiar in right-wing circles. These are the same people who funded Steve Bannon. A whole circle of these people are funding these cases because of their animus toward unions, and it has nothing to do with the question of fairness or whether this is free speech or not. They are trying to destroy the labor movement. This is their mission. There is a great study that I talked about in one of my podcasts that talks about who is actually behind these series of cases.

Now to your question. Unions are by law required to do what’s known as “duty of care representation.” If you ask any normal labor lawyer on the union side what the biggest number of cases they have, it is these duty of care representation cases. What are those? This is when someone who is not a union member pays a fee and says that the union did not represent them well, and sues because their grievance wasn’t handled well. That means that anybody under the union contract can take on those cases. So on the one side you have this fact that unions are required to represent everybody, which costs a lot of money.

In America, we have a belief that you don’t get something for free. If you want to join a private club, you have to pay money for the service. This has been the long standing precedent. It simply says you have every right in the public sector not to belong to the union. You don’t have to be a union member but you need to pay a fee for the benefit of the collective bargaining. And that seemed to me to be fairest approach and a reasonable one. None of that money must be used for political purposes. And unions are required actually to divide the cost to make sure that the money that’s paid in agency fees is not going to political operations.

Compelled Speech and “Getting Something for Nothing.”

Bob Zadek: Now, Justice Alito, in his decision, said that the free rider issue can be dealt with in lots of other ways and under strongly established constitutional law principles. When free speech rights are implicated in some way the government has a huge burden to show that the infringement on free speech rights cannot be accomplished by any other means. The Supreme Court said there are other ways for the union to be compensated to avoid the detriments of the free-rider problem.

As to the issue of the allocation, of course unions have spent a fair amount of money as they are required to allocate expenses between political activities and contract negotiation and administration. However, those calculations were looked upon with a fair amount of skepticism, because there is so much judgment involved, and obviously it is human nature to imagine that if unions are making that calculation, where there are a myriad of judgment calls, they will make the judgment in favor of their own interests. Therefore, the allocation was felt by the Supreme Court in Janus, and by others in the labor management world, as being somewhat suspect. So that is the response to the union response that the workers are not paying for political activity because they allocate the money in the best way possible.

Now, Jonathan, you could say that the unions worked very hard to do a good job, and I could be skeptical, and it has to sort of stop there. But the issue was discussed in the Supreme Court decision, was it not?

Jonathan Tasini: Yes, and Justice Alito is probably one of the smartest Justices on the conservative wing. He is smart in the sense that he is the most committed ideologue in that wing, and he has come up with a concoction in order to justify the overturning of a 40-year precedent. Do I think that every division of the cost of this was perfect? Did every single dime go just to the collective bargaining? I’m not sure about that, but if you tell us to go back, there’s no question, and I know this internally from unions I am familiar with — they spend an enormous amount of time doing that division. I think the bigger question, if I could say — or at least an important question is — do we think that it’s a decent notion that if I’m Joe Smith or Mark Janus, that if I’m getting the benefits of collective bargaining, that I should not be required to pay a fee?

If I want to join my private gym and I get something in return, it seems to me that you can’t get that for free. And that is essentially what Alito has said. We are not going to require people to pay this fee.

I just think it is bizarre, and it certainly contradicts 40 years of the way with which we went about things. By the way that precedent that was overturned was a unanimous decision 40 years ago by the Supreme Court. Back in the day when conservatives and liberals weren’t ideologues and didn’t have a political agenda, which Alito does, as he has strong anti-union animus, it was decided unanimously that you could charge agency fees.

Bob Zadek: Now, let us go to the issue of getting “something for nothing,” because it’s an important point. You’ve mentioned it twice so far and I acknowledge that the American ethos is that you shouldn’t get something for nothing. You should pay your fair share of what you get. However, let’s take the issue of wages and benefits and compensation to employees.

When the union does its job and does as aggressive job as possible to negotiate the highest wages for public service workers, what it is doing is it is in effect making a political decision. Because, to the extent that the employer, the state or local government employer, the school system, has to pay money to teachers in the contract, they don’t pay money for something else like police protection or the roads or sewers or whatever it is that municipalities and governments do. So that’s a political decision itself, and therefore, it is possible that a worker believes, as a political matter, that his community should allocate more money to police protection and less money to education.

That’s how we would vote with his ballot box. By being compelled to support a union which will negotiate for a bigger piece of the pie for workers, Mark Janus is supporting a political position that he doesn’t endorse. Does that in any way offend you? Because that is clearly compelled speech. He’s forcing government to allocate money differently than he would otherwise like as a voter.

Jonathan Tasini: You raised an interesting point. This is what I will say. Mark Janus, or whoever else, wears different hats in life. As a citizen I have the right to go vote for Bob as my legislator because he or she believes the budget should be allocated as x, y, z. But in my life as a worker, I have an obligation to pay because I am getting a benefit. If he felt really strongly about this, maybe he should resign his job — and I’m not suggesting you do that since it is an extreme position — but you have to pay for that service, and that is all. It should make sense to people if you take that out of the realm of this debate about ideology and how money should be spent in the state.

Bob Zadek: Let us digress for a moment to Obamacare or health insurance. Under the Obamacare plan — and I’m oversimplifying to make a point — I would be compelled, if I bought certain plans, to buy coverage for maternity, or coverage for other illnesses that there is no way on earth I’m going to get. Now on one hand, I’m buying something and therefore am getting a benefit. On the other hand, the benefit is illusionary. I would rather have the money. So Janus would say that what you’re describing as a benefit, that is higher wages, is a detriment. It is not even a benefit. So the concept of free-rider has a bit of an asterisk to it because Janus might not consider it to be a benefit to get higher wages. He is paying the union to get him higher wages which he doesn’t even want and he considers to be a detriment. And that’s kind of the free-rider concept.

Jonathan Tasini: I chuckle about this because I doubt any of the people who don’t want to pay union fees do not want the wages and benefits that come with that. Finding a single person that says that, “I am turning back all those wages and all those health benefits I am getting as part of the collective bargaining agreement because I’m not paying these fees would be so difficult. I think the largest question that you’re starting to touch on is that in society we pay for things because we are part of the larger community. We don’t get an income tax form that has a whole series of boxes where we check off things you want to pay for and things you don’t want to pay for. For my example, I think we spend an obscene amount on the defense department and our military spending, which has huge political effects.

I don’t get to send my tax form and say that this is against my free speech rights because I really oppose military spending. I don’t get to do that. I have to pay for those things separately. I get to support, for example, someone like Bernie Sanders and try to get him elected president because I think he will be better in certain areas. So in a certain way, yes, as part of living in this world we don’t get to say and do as we please because then you’d have no red lights. We’d have chaos. So there are certain things that living in a organized and decent society that means that certain things happen that we don’t like.

Collective Bargaining: Key to Strong Middle Class?

Bob Zadek: Now, the Janus case is feared. No one knows exactly what the effect on America on the Janus case will be. The unions and legislators are working very hard to find statutory workarounds. They have just begun. Many people believe the effects can be diminished. That doesn’t make me happy. Maybe it makes you happy. We are not discussing happiness on the show, but there will be lots of workarounds. There will be lots of attempted workarounds, some will fail, some will succeed, some will be silly, some will be found to be unconstitutional, but there will be workarounds. But the core question is that public service unions are relatively new phenomenon in America. Of course, as we all know, Franklin Roosevelt was opposed to to unions representing government workers.

So their history is recent and their power is kind of recent. I start from the position that I wish we didn’t even have public service workers unions such as the teachers, and AFSCME, and SEIU, because I don’t see any collective benefit. I look at the federal government, where it is sort of begrudgingly okay, because the union representing the federal workers cannot negotiate wages on their behalf and of course cannot strike.

So tell us, if you will, what public good — putting aside the private good of getting higher wages for the workers — but you argue for the collective. What public or collective benefit beyond the workers is there for this country to have active and powerful public employee unions?

Jonathan Tasini: Excellent question. So I start with the presumption and belief that every single person should have a union. It starts with two things. I’ll start with the least importance. Collective bargaining injects some sort of certainty in the workplace, both in the private sector and the public sector, meaning the supervisors and the employers know what’s expected of them and how to behave in the workplace. You may remember that collective bargaining began in the 20th century as a way to try to tamp down the wild strikes, where there were millions of people out in the streets in the twenties and thirties, largely because of the great depression where poverty was so systemic then. Collective bargaining was put in place to try to have some sort of greater peace so that both workers and management would know what was required of them.

But here is the second thing, and this is always astonishing to me. I sometimes debate Stephen Moore, a very conservative economist, who is quite anti-union. He says, one of the problems we’ve had in the economy is low wages. I always say to Steven that these two things are intimately related. If you took a graph, and I’m going to try to describe this for your listeners, and you looked at the decline of unionization over the last 30 or 40 years, it almost exactly mirrors the increase of inequality and declining wages. It is just a fact that unions have basically built the middle class. I think that even most conservatives would agree, union wages are much higher. They may not like unions because they takes away some of power from companies and employers, but if we want a middle class, whether you are public sector or a private sector, there is no other way.

It is just a fact that individuals cannot go out and bargain for themselves and get a decent wage. The reason we see people still worried — we have this low unemployment right now — why are wages low? The fact is that it is because we don’t have unions in America. If you look at the rest of the world at the prosperous countries, certainly in western Europe, they have a very high rate of unionization. They have all sorts of socialist protection built in. Pensions are a part of the way people live. Here, we have this bare bones system where people don’t have real healthcare, they don’t have any pensions anymore, and we don’t have wages. I would argue it is because of the decline of unionization.

The Argument for and Against a Free Market

Bob Zadek: I agree that unions were as important, if not the most important, factor in the growth of the middle-class in America. But here is my libertarian response. There are lots of circumstances when goods and services and products are bought and sold at a price for more than they are worth, and by worth, I mean the price which the free market would dictate, so it’s no big deal to simply, as in minimum wages, legislate that people must buy and sell goods or services at something more than the market value of their services.

So, I agree with what you said, and one of my beefs when I discuss unions, is that one of the main purposes, is to see to it that their members get paid more than they are worth, and by worth I mean more than the market would dictate the services are worth — and I would say that’s a minus, not a plus.

Jonathan Tasini: There is no such thing as a free market. I don’t think it ever existed. There is no such thing as a free market today. If you look at all the way the tax system is and the way it benefits certain companies over others, and the way CEO salaries are negotiated, there is no such thing as a free market. I think that the free market is just a marketing phrase that’s used to accomplish ideological goals, mainly to enrich a few over the vast majority of people. I think there’s no debate that today we have the most unequal country we have had in probably the last fifty years.

I think that’s partly because this notion of the “free market” has been something we worship, and mostly perhaps the elites worship it, and it has really impoverished people. But here’s a very specific example where I think that we underestimate the willingness of individuals to pay more for service. I took part in some focus groups, meaning from behind the window I was watching people and just questions around Walmart.

Walmart is the biggest employer in the United States. Everybody knows that Walmart’s selling point is that it offers low prices to people and it does not have a union. People were asked if they knew that if Walmart had to raise its prices because it had to guarantee people healthcare and pay a higher wage, would you be willing to pay the nickel or ten cents more per product?

Virtually everyone in that room said “yes.” Now, the caveat to that is that Walmart also benefits from the poverty of people. Overwhelmingly, the people who shop there are so poor or are so stressed in terms of their money, that they have no other option and have to shop at Walmart. So going back to my point about the middle class. If we want to have a middle class we have have to raise wages, and I believe that if people have higher wages they will be willing to pay the extra nickel for a big Mac or ten cents or whatever it is at the restaurants, because food is one of the biggest things people purchase. So I think these things are tied together. I don’t think it’s the labor movements fault, if I can use that word. I think it’s the way we have a system that does not really reward hard work and shovels too much wealth to a few people.

Bob Zadek: I have a free market response to that anecdote you shared with us about the focus group. They were asked, If I may, the wrong question. Not, “would you be willing to pay ten cents more for whatever — if it was going to work or healthcare.” Well, that’s not the right question. The question would be if there were two Walmart stores, and one which charged ten cents more and offered worker better benefits and one which charged a modest amount less and didn’t offer those benefits, which Walmart would you patronize?

Now that’s the free market!

That means that some people would willingly pay more. I have a choice. I have a free market and I am given an option and I choose to have a non-genetically modified food or genetically modified food. But in your example, the question was kind of silly. Well, you didn’t give the focus group participants a choice. If Walmart raised their prices, what choice do you have? If Walmart is still the cheapest, you have no choice. You might be grumpy, but you’re going to pay ten cents more more because you have no choice. So I don’t quite understand exactly what the proof of that focus group question is.

Jonathan Tasini: I see what you are saying, and there is no question that there would be some people who would rather pay ten cents less. But the point I was trying to make was that we may not benefit from a low-cost, free-market world. My point, which touches on everything we talk about, is that it is not a society that is sustainable.

Essentially, we end up with a society where people can’t afford to pay their bills and the you get a whole list of things. You get homelessness, bankruptcies, people having to take up to two or more jobs. People don’t have time to spend with their kids. It comes down to how do we divide our wealth. How do we share the wealth of the wealthiest country in human history? How do we share that? And in my view, it is not by the lowest cost and it is not by giving CEOs tens of millions of dollars and giving the workers little. And it might be the only way, at least in the marketplace, to achieve that.

A Point of Agreement: Unbalanced Corporate Governance

Bob Zadek: You mentioned twice the CEO’s salaries. Now, I’m going to join forces with you and I’m going to tell you, on another show I would love to about corporate governance, because I believe corporate governance in America is as sick as sick can be, and I believe that there is something profoundly wrong with how we compensate senior management. Senior shareholders really don’t get to vote. I find it to be an embarrassment. I hate it. I look at any CEO in America, any CEO being fed tons and tons and tons of data and delegating lots of research to committees and making decisions. I daresay that among my circle of friends, almost anybody other than visionaries like Gates or Jeff Bezos or Steve Jobs — there are many visionaries — but there are many people who are just empty suits who have gotten to the top and they are paid infinitely more than they are worth.

So Jonathan, I’m with you on that. But that is kind of a separate issue, because that is a structural issue in dealing with governance and not dealing with free market issues.

Jonathan Tasini: It is not a separate issue. Although I agree with what you said, and part of that is that their pensions are huge. But those CEOs, who are part of a circle of elites, they are the ones who pervert the marketplace. That is why I said there is no such thing as a free-market. Part of that is the system of corporate governance that we have. I don’t think the issues are separate.

Do We Need Unions to Improve Wages?

Bob Zadek: Now I have another a direct question for you that I’ve been looking forward to asking. Teachers are a big segment public employees. Teachers’ unions are very active, very vocal, and very visible because they deal with kids. Teachers complain that they are grossly underpaid as compared to something else.

It’s the concept of “underpaid” that I do not understand. If they are not being paid the market value of their services, the issue is not unions. That is purely political. Take any county in America. That county makes a decision. Does money go to kids, or go to firemen, or go to roads, or go to nobody? If the residents of that community are not happy with the allocation of resources, they will vote the bums out and put in people who will build better school systems.

The allocation of money between schools and other needs is done in the political process. If a teacher is not offered enough salary in a school district then don’t take the job. If the salary of teachers is not sufficient for you — a budding teacher who is taking an education degree — don’t be a teacher. And if you become a teacher, then you do so with your eyes open. So it is the concept of being underpaid, as an economic concept, that I don’t understand.

Jonathan Tasini: I do think that a group of people, whether it be teachers or any group of citizen or activists, needs leadership. The word “union” can sometimes be a red flag. Donald Trump, for example, got elected because there were lots of people who organized onto that campaign. There were lots of people who put the ads on TV. Things don’t happen spontaneously. That is why teachers need leadership from unions. You mention this point of being “underpaid.” I just did a series on the last several months about the teacher uprising in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona, and North Carolina. All of those happened because teachers were underpaid.

I spoke to one teacher, who was not a Democrat, who had to go to a food bank or food pantry. Again, I want to say — a teacher in the United States of America could not earn enough money to feed her family. That to me is an outrage. Teachers, the people who are trying to mold the minds of our future generations, can’t make enough money to feed their families.

Now, the interesting thing about these uprisings is that the parents and the teenagers stood with the teachers, because kids are going to schools where lots of teacher positions are less open because teachers are leaving the profession because they can’t afford to make a living, and in addition to not only the parents, you had school superintendents, the people who run the damn schools, stand with the teachers.

We are starting to see the result of the foolish notion of these services being available with lower taxes. We have to pay for what we want, and if you want decent schools we have to pay for them. I think it is important that this happened in red states. People are beginning to realize that we are broken here.

Bob Zadek: You’re exactly right. Sure, in many low-tax states and municipalities, such as Kansas where Brownback misjudged his constituency and took a hit at the ballot box. You mentioned active parents complaining. That’s exactly how it’s supposed to work! Just like saying, these roads suck and if you don’t fix the roads, I’m not gonna vote for you.

Well, these schools suck. If you don’t fix the schools, I’m not voting for you. That’s how it’s supposed to work, and each community will make a decision. If communities make the wrong decision, people leave because one wants to work there. The community declines. People vote with their feet. I warmly embraced this concept. I love voting with your feet. So the point is that the wages will go up because the taxpayers demand it, because they demand good schools. But, that’s not a union function. That is the way it is supposed to work.

Jonathan Tasini: This is what I’m proud of, by being a union member. Unions represent people in the community. The fact that you sit in a building that is not going to poison you is the result of unions. The fact that we are talking today on a Sunday is because of the labor unions. It is an economic benefit to have unions, not an economic detriment.

Bob Zadek: Who invented this concept that wages must go up? Wages will go up if the value of an hour of a worker’s time is more than it was yesterday. It is everybody’s job to offer or to sell something that is at a price they are willing to accept. You can’t legislate increased values.

Jonathan Tasini: Work productivity has increased dramatically over 30 to 40 years and if people got their value, they should be making $20 an hour. The value of people’s’ work is being taken from them by CEO pay and corporate policies.

Bob Zadek: How can people follow your work?

Jonathan Tasini: People can follow me at @Jonathantasini for Twitter, and I have a podcast at workinglife.org which you can sign up for free.

Bob Zadek: What is the driving philosophy of your podcast?

Jonathan Tasini: This is a blog that I started when blogs just started in 2004 about work, the economy, and politics, and is written from a progressive, pro-union, democratic-socialist view.

Bob Zadek: Jonathan, thank you so much for spending an hour of your time with me this morning.

Related Shows:

A Teacher’s Stand Against Her Union — Rebecca Friedrichs and Terry Pell, 6/19/2016
Lawson Bader on DonorsTrust and the Right to Free Association, 10/22/17
You Must Join with Stan Greer, 6/25/2014
Lisa Snell on School Choice Experiments, 3/19/2017
Unions and The Economy with Steven Greenhut, 7/2/2014