Nolte: Public Unions Lose over 90% of Non-Member Dues After SCOTUS Ruling

Two powerful, left-wing public unions lost over 90 percent of non-member fees after the Supreme Court ruled against forcing non-members to pay union dues.

In other words, until June of 2018 we lived in a country where public sector workers who chose not to join their respective unions were still forced to pay union dues, which are called agency fees.

These agency fees represented 70 to 80 percent of union dues and were forcibly removed from the pay checks of public workers who wanted nothing to do with far-left unions that spend billions of dollars every year to elect Democrats.

The Supreme Court ruled that these mandatory union dues violated the free speech of non-members, who had been forced through these un-American agency fees to contribute to political campaigns they wanted no part of.

Overall, while I have no issue with unionizing in the private sector, public unions are a cancer on our democracy, a scam that launders taxpayer dollars through these public unions and into Democrat campaign coffers.

The idea that public sector workers were forced to pay these dues was outrageous and the Supreme Court did the exact right thing in putting a stop to it.

The best news is that this liberation of the working man has been devastating to the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), who lost millions of dollars and 210,000 agency-fee payers in 2018.

Overall, while these public sector unions still have millions of voluntary members, AFSCME lost 98 percent of its 112,233 nonmembers (now only 2,200 pay agency fees). The SEIU lost 94 percent of its 104,501 nonmembers (now only 5,800 pay).

This does not mean SEIU and AFSCME have lost their power. With 1.9 million and 1.3 million voluntary members, respectively, both organizations still take in a ton of taxpayer money that will be funneled almost exclusively to Democrats and other left-wing causes.

But with an end to what was nothing more than legalized theft, the First Amendment rights of public workers are finally protected from a scam that forced Americans to pay for speech they disagreed with.

 

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