If this movement expands across the country, the consequences could harm constituents as well as elected officials and their staffs.
A union scheme to organize them will have its day in court.
I magine for a moment you’re a lifelong Democrat and you just landed your dream job as a policy adviser to your United States senator.
Now imagine learning that to participate in workplace and employment negotiations in your office, you have to become a dues-paying member of an association that is known to support almost exclusively Republican politics and GOP candidates for office.
If that sounds like a nightmare scenario, it is. But it’s also far too close to the reality in a growing movement to force legislative employees in capitols across the country to choose between joining a union that seeks their party’s electoral defeat and forgoing a voice in their workplace matters.
Last year, state legislative staffers in both Oregon and California had a go at unionizing. The California attempt failed, but Oregon legislative staff succeeded in persuading the state’s labor board to certify an International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers affiliate to represent their bargaining unit.
This year, an effort is under way to allow the unionization of Washington State legislative staff, and talks are ongoing in Washington, D.C., to unionize congressional staffers.
If this legislative-union movement expands across the country, the consequences could harm constituents as well as elected officials and their staffs.
When the Washington State legislation allowing capitol staff to unionize failed to meet an important calendar deadline, the Democratic legislative staff did what we’ve come to expect of unions when they don’t get their way — they staged a sick-out, which ground to a halt the constituent services and policy work that should have been taking place in their offices.
Every day, Americans contact their state and federal lawmakers for guidance on a wide variety of issues that have nothing to do with partisan politics, such as navigating government bureaucracies to address military pensions or Medicaid-payment problems or questions about enforcing a child-support order.
The constituents who were not being served by their Washington State Democratic lawmakers while the staff staged a work stoppage paid a price even before unionization could take effect at the state capitol. Imagine if a strike lasted more than a day or two, while legislative staffers carried out a union’s bidding rather than the work they were hired to do by the elected official and the American voter.
And therein lies another issue entirely: Unions do not answer to the voters.
Teachers’ unions have made that very clear during the past two years. Imagine if a unionized legislative workforce decided that their partisan politics superseded the very real needs of everyday Americans looking for help from their legislative office.
Moreover, what happens when the union chosen to represent all legislative staff decides to get involved in the electoral race of an elected official it doesn’t like? The staffer is now in the unenviable position of having to work with a union that is seeking to unseat his or her boss and terminate his very livelihood.
Unionizing legislative staffers is a nakedly political power grab to extort money from staff to fill the campaign coffers of lawmakers and elect only those the union likes.
Imagine if that union took dues money from a Blue Dog Democrat’s staffer and used it to elect a new member of The Squad?
On March 4, a critical legal obstacle in the lawsuit that raised this issue was surmounted when Oregon appellate commissioner Theresa Kidd concluded that state representative Kimberly Wallan (Republican) and her legislative assistant, Sarah Daley, had proper standing to challenge the ongoing effort to make Oregon the first U.S. state in which elected officials’ aides are unionized.
Last August, the Freedom Foundation (where I work) filed a lawsuit on the pair’s behalf challenging the constitutionality of unionizing legislative staff and asking for a review of the state Employment Relations Board’s decision to certify IBEW as the exclusive representative of legislative assistants.
The state defendants responded immediately with a variety of motions and attempts to delay the proceeding, including a motion to dismiss the case entirely on the grounds that legislative staff opposed to unionization lack standing to bring a challenge in the first place.
Kidd, however, correctly noted:
Unions are, themselves, a political issue, as they are capable of participating in politics. Petitioners — a political representative and her delegee — have a substantial interest in ensuring that all who work in Wallan’s office share the political views that will advance Wallan’s political agenda, including political views on unions themselves, and a union’s ability to represent certain employees on certain employment issues.
In the wake of Kidd’s ruling, the Freedom Foundation’s lawsuit can now be argued on its merits — including that legislative staffers should not be compelled to be associated with a political entity having vastly different, if not outright competing, political objectives.
These labor unions, and the activists pushing for unionization of legislative staff, are playing an obvious power-grabbing game to make lawmakers even further beholden to a one-sided political agenda.