One of my friends here in Idaho is a school teacher and union activist. She told me something a couple of years back that reminded me that Idaho is almost a mirror image of California. She said that the legislature had passed a law prohibiting voluntary deduction of union dues from school teacher paychecks. In California, of course, there's nothing voluntary about it--it will happen whether you want it to or not.
It turned out that what she told me wasn't quite right. It wasn't union dues that Idaho prohibits from being deducted from paychecks--but political action committee funding. Today in Ysura v. Pocatello Education Association (2009), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that there was nothing unconstitutional about Idaho prohibiting the deduction of political contributions from paychecks. Union dues can be deducted (with signed authorization of the employee, of course--this isn't California), but if the union wants teachers to kick in political contributions, they will have to write their own check, and not have the government collect the money for them. So, why is this a problem? As the Court explained:
The court below concluded, and Idaho does not dispute, that "unions faceHuh? These contributions for political speech were voluntary before this new law took effect in 2003, and voluntary afterwards. The only conclusion that I can draw is that one of two situations makes payroll deduction dramatically more effective:
substantial difficulties in collecting funds for political speech without using
payroll deductions."
1. Teachers are too lazy to write a check to their union's political action committee.
2. There was some significant pressure on teachers to allow payroll deduction of political action committee funding, and without the state doing so, teachers just "forget" to do so.
Neither of these is exactly a ringing endorsement of the level of support that the teachers union enjoys from its rank and file, is it?
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