Photo by David | CC BY 2.0
The invasion was a long time coming, but it’s finally arrived. Many public sector unions will be smashed in the Supreme Court’s upcoming decision of “Janus vs. AFSCME.” Many labor leaders are privately panicked: the machinery is in motion and unprepared unions will get crunched in the gears.
By agreeing to decide Janus, the judges placed themselves among a long line of courts that sought to radically change labor relations in the United States. With each major decision the court either cemented new legal rights for unions or took them away. In recent years the court ate away at the edges of union power, but with Janus the conservative court looks to stab at the heart.
Janus is an attack on the last bastion of concentrated union power: 34 percent of public employees work for unionized workplaces (as opposed to only 6 percent of the private sector workforce). Not since corporate-champion Ronald Reagan made America “great again” have unions faced such an assault; and most are painfully unprepared.
Some unions are having a fear-based reaction to Janus, choosing flight over fight; they believe that existing in a post-Janus world won’t be possible for them, as bargaining or enforcing union contracts will face additional, seemingly insurmountable barriers. Moving away from collective bargaining agreements, they seek to transition into a “21st century union,” the details of which look more like a lobby group and less like a…