July 1, 2014

Decisions decisions

I know I should be posting about the SCOTUS Hobby Lobby case that set women's rights back about five decades. But instead I'd like to mention the Harris v. Quinn case that was decided also 5-4 that despite the employee directly benefiting from a union's collective bargaining agreement with the State, said employee, if working independently of a union does not have to pay "dues."
This stems from a 1977 decision that allowed public employee unions to collect union dues from anyone working in the field whether or not they were in the union because all workers benefited from the union-sponsored collective bargaining. SCOTUS says no. Well 55.5% of them did. And in the decision, implied that they would gleefully undermine all union membership if they could.
And once unions are gone and corporations have more rights than human beings, we will find our workplaces even less pleasant than they already are.

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