Unions appear united against Janus decision
Celeste Van Kirk/Observer-Reporter
Barry Andrews, vice president of Washington-Greene Counties Central Labor Council is shown at the labor council office in Washington Tuesday.
Celeste Van Kirk/Observer-Reporter
Barry Andrews and his organization, the Washington-Greene Counties Central Labor Council, welcomed three new members to the council’s hall of fame Saturday.
Barry Andrews is as pro-union as he is anti-Janus decision.
Andrews is vice president of Washington-Greene Counties Central Labor Council, which represents about 14,000 union members in those two counties on political and legislative issues and at the bargaining table. He is staunchly opposed to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling of June 27, the Janus case, which gives public employees who are represented by a bargaining unit but are not members of that union the choice of paying or not paying dues, which fund collective bargaining efforts.
These dues, which previously were required and have been important to financial operations of unions for more than 40 years, will be sorely missed, said Andrews, a 42-year member of American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.
“The minute the Janus decision was handed down, we lost $5 million in Pennsylvania because of the loss of ‘fair share’ fees,” he said. “It hampers our ability to effect change on collective bargaining.
“Under Act 195, we have to represent people who paid the fair share fee. We’re getting to be very limited financially thanks to this decision.”
Mark Janus, a child support specialist for the Illinois state government, challenged whether states violate employees’ First Amendment rights by requiring them to join public-sector unions they may not want to join. He won, and the result, Andrews and many other labor figures believe, is the nation’s diminishing union presence will continue to shrink – with a corporate push.
“It’s been well established that the effort by Mr. Janus was funded by huge corporations that had money,” Andrews said. “We battled successfully over a number of years against that. This takes away union power to collectively bargain contracts. This is using union dues to effect political change. According to (Pennsylvania) Act 195, you cannot use dues for political purposes.”
Teachers, government employees and service employees are among the most at peril. AFSCME and the Service Employees International Union, according to Andrews, “are the biggest unions” affected by the ruling.
The issue is polarizing, to be sure. The Observer-Reporter contacted, but got no response from two members of the Service Employees International Union, two from AFSCME, and one representative each from the Pennsylvania State Education Association and the United Steelworkers.
Another SEIU official, based in Harrisburg, declined to comment on the Janus matter last week, but forwarded a news release the union issued in the immediate aftermath of the top court’s June ruling. Union members or officials, eight in all, spoke out, including International President Mary Kay Henry.
She said: “This decision is yet another example of how billionaires rig the system against working people, but SEIU members won’t let the extremists behind this case divide us. We will stay united, help working men and women who are fighting to form unions and call on our elected leaders to do everything in their power to make it easier for working people to join together in unions.”
About 400 Washington Health System employees are members of SEIU Healthcare Pennsylvania, but are unaffected by the Janus case because the system is a private entity, an official confirmed.
The ruling has its supporters, though. Lloyd Corder, of Carnegie Mellon University, conducted a nationwide survey of government union members for the Commonwealth Foundation, a Pennsylvania think tank. Among its findings: 51 percent consider the changes to be positive; 6 percent say they have already stopped paying dues; and 25 percent say they will stop paying.
Charles Mitchell, the foundation’s president and chief executive officer, said in a statement: “The Supreme Court righted a decades-old wrong with the Janus decision. Now we know a majority of government union members approve of this decision.”
PSEA, which has 181,000 members and represents employees in all Washington and Greene school districts except Peters Township, certainly doesn’t endorse the Janus decision.
Union President Dolores McCracken said of the ruling that day: “The court’s ruling is disappointing, but not unexpected. This case was financed by anti-union front groups who want to silence the voices of working people who speak up through their unions for better schools, adequate public services and good jobs.
“If the goal of the people who funded this lawsuit is to silence us, I can tell you that it’s not going to happen.”
The union was embroiled in a related matter recently, when it returned thousands of dollars to four teachers who have objected to union payments for religious reasons.
State Rep. Pam Snyder, D-Jefferson, spoke in a booming voice on the dues issue. Actually, it was a booming keyboard. She wrote in a July 22 editorial for the O-R:
“The purposeful dismantling of the U.S. union workforce, which continued with the Supreme Court’s recent Janus v. AFSCME decision, must be reversed if we are to pull the middle class out of the greed-fueled economic quicksand that threatens to swallow it whole.
“It’s no secret that mighty business interests, dating back to the robber barons and captains of industry, have detested unions since their inception. They’d greatly prefer to cling to the unfettered ability to set wages, benefits and workplace safety rules – and, even more so, to be the only well-funded voice heard in the halls of government when it’s time to craft labor laws.
“The Janus decision basically allows public-sector workers to keep receiving union-negotiated pay and benefits while avoiding any responsibility to pay their share as beneficiaries of that service. It’s merely another way to judicially weaken the clout of organized labor.”
Snyder went on to say, “I’ve signed on as a co-sponsor of the upcoming PA Workplace Freedom Act, a bipartisan effort in Harrisburg to allow Pennsylvania’s public-sector workers to form a union through simple majority support, instead of the lengthy, bureaucratic procedure that currently exists.”
Union representation has plummeted locally over the past half century. Andrews estimates about 50,000 union members resided in Washington and Greene counties in the 1970s, but the number is about one-sixth that now.
“It’s bad,” Andrews lamented. AFSCME, he added, has lost “44, maybe 47, percent of our union membership nationwide.”
Like many companies and workers, Andrews said his labor council is looking at the energy field as a potential boost.
“We have not done a good job organizing people in the oil and gas fields,” he said. “We need to concentrate on these segments of labor. There also will be 3,000 to 4,000 jobs related to building the (Shell) cracker plant (in Beaver County). Then there will be 600 to 800 permanent jobs after it’s built. Our plan is to represent them.”
In the meantime, he tries to be upbeat.
“I’m supposed to be more optimistic,” Andrews said. “But the past few years have been difficult. We keep fighting the odds.”