Should Union-Backed Fraud Be Legal?

I magine for a moment that you look at your next pay stub and see that 4 percent of your wages is being diverted to an organization that you never joined and whose principles you don’t support.

You complain to your employer, who informs you that the deductions were authorized by the membership card you signed years earlier. Knowing you never signed anything of the kind, you demand to see this documentation.

It turns out to be an obvious forgery.

Think you’d be livid?

At a time when the economy is spiraling from recession to a seemingly inevitable depression, with inflation at a 40-year high, you need every dollar you earn just to get by. And yet you discover that hundreds of dollars every year are being pilfered from your wages by an organization that spends it unapologetically to elect the very politicians responsible for the country’s dire economic straits.

With no other recourse, you file a lawsuit to reclaim your lost income — and a panel of judges replies: “Sorry, I know this group and they wouldn’t lie. They say you signed a card, so you signed a card.”

If this nightmare scenario sounds like something dreamed up by George Orwell, it is.

But for more than a dozen public employees on the West Coast, it’s all too real.

Last week, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued rulings in cases brought by the Freedom Foundation alleging that government unions forged public employees’ signatures on membership agreements in order to continue deducting dues from their pay.

Perhaps the most egregious of the decisions is found in Zielinski v. SEIU 503, in which SEIU forged Mr. Zielinski’s signature twice on two separate dues authorizations.

These decisions essentially authorize government-employee unions to ignore the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 2018 ruling in Janus v. AFSCME by engaging in state-sanctioned fraud.

In Janus, the court affirmed that forcing public employees to join or financially support a labor union is a violation of their First Amendment rights. The ruling cleared the way for government employees to opt out of their union with no consequences, and in the years since, many thousands have.

The defections have cut deeply into the unions’ already anemic rates of membership. To cite just one example, Service Employees International Union (SEIU) 503, the largest government union in the state of Oregon (and the defendant in the lawsuits described above), has lost more than 40 percent of its dues-paying members since 2018, costing it millions of dollars every year. In response, left-leaning lower-court judges have given the unions a life raft by ensuring that they won’t be held responsible even if they commit a felony intended to deceive workers.

Following the Court’s reasoning, there is no constitutional duty for the union or the state to obtain consent from the employee. The court concluded that if the union claims to have obtained the employee’s permission, the state may rely on the union’s statement to deduct union dues and is required to do nothing to protect the First Amendment rights of public workers.

This is another in a long list of examples exposing the reality that politicians and judges, like the unions that put them in power, are subject to a different legal standard than common folk.

It is decisions like this that make the Ninth Circuit the most overturned court in the country. The Freedom Foundation very much looks forward to taking these cases to the United States Supreme Court.