Tuesday, February 10, 1998

Unions' political muscle may be at risk

By George Will

NEWPORT BEACH, Calif. -- The most important voting this election year will not occur in November and will not award any office to anyone. It will happen June 2, when Californians vote on the Campaign Reform Initiative that would bar unions from spending any portion of any member's dues on political activity without the member's written consent, renewed annually.

If passed, CRI almost certainly will radically reduce unions' political muscle, thereby substantially altering politics in the state that can be decisive in presidential elections.

National labor leaders disparage CRI as "payback" for the $35 million unions spent in 1996, which bought issue advocacy for Democrats and helped shave nine seats off the Republicans' House majority. But CRI actually began, in part, as payback for labor's intervention in the Saddleback Unified School Board election near here.

Frank Ury, member of a group promoting school-choice voucher systems and back-to-basics curricula, lost a school board election when the teachers' union spent $70,000 against him. (Five thousand dollars is a normal expenditure in such races.) When he heard from teachers who voted for him and resented being forced to fund opposition to him, Ury and two others wrote CRI.

In 1992 in Washington state, voters overwhelmingly passed something similar to CRI, and within a year the number of teachers' union members contributing $1 a month to political funds shrank from 48,000 to 8,000. Unions rightly fear freedom of choice regarding political spending for the same reason teachers' unions fear school choice: They know what people will choose.

About 40 percent of union households vote Republican. Seven of the top 10 contributors in the 1995-96 election cycle were unions, which gave 97 percent of their money to Democrats. An October Washington Post/ABC poll found 82 percent support for a federal version of CRI, called a "Payroll Protection Act."

Mark Bucher, another CRI co-author, was provoked by the $12.5 million the teachers' union alone spent to defeat a 1993 school-choice initiative. He says when recent polling about CRI revealed an astonishing 82 percent support, a "push-down question" was included in polling to provoke hostile responses. Before those questioned gave their opinions on CRI, they were told:

"Your local school teachers' association opposes this initiative and says it will result in less money for our public schools. The teachers say this initiative will reduce their ability to make needed changes in Sacramento, such as class size reduction."

This drove support down, but only to 72 percent, including 66 percent of Democrats, with union and nonunion voters equally supportive. However, the public's healthy inattention to politics, and its healthy conservatism, meaning skepticism, about ballot measures, means there usually is a 10 percent to 20 percent reflexive "no" vote against initiatives.

Still, the desperation of CRI's opponents can be gauged by their Orwellian rhetoric. Unions may spend more than $20 million to disseminate the idea that attempts to give union members a voice regarding political uses of their money amounts to "an employee gag order" and "silencing workers."

Opponents of CRI say "fairness" would require corporations to get prior permission from shareholders for political spending. But owning shares, unlike joining a union, is always optional.

Opponents say it would be unfair to limit union leaders' rights to spend members' money while, say, the National Rifle Association remains free to spend members' money without seeking special permission. But people join the NRA largely for political leverage, whereas the Supreme Court has held that under existing law, the primary function of unions is to deal with employers on labor-management issues, and workers have a right to refunds of the portion of their dues not spent thereon.

One of President Clinton's first acts countermanded President Bush's order requiring government contractors to notify employees of this refund right. A survey indicates 78 percent of workers do not know they can choose a refund. Today's "pro-choice" president likes that. The "pro-choice" party depends on that.

CRI's opponents made a hollow threat to sponsor retaliatory initiatives ending $10 billion of tax breaks for corporations. The peculiar threat was: Stop CRI or we will shrink the profits that provide our members' pay.

By opposing CRI, union leaders reveal their real -- and you would think embarrassing -- estimate of their ability to elicit members' voluntary participation in the leaders' politics. But embarrassment is nothing next to unions' fear of CRI's power to shift the balance of power in California and, as an infectious idea, elsewhere.

Washington Post Writers Group