BY JOHN McNAY

The Supreme Court’s attack on the labor movement last week by the five Republican justices was an unjust act rooted entirely in politics and having nothing to do with the Constitution.

It is a right-wing fantasy to suggest that everything public union members do is a political act. With the increasing corporate model our government agencies and state institutions have adopted, our public unions are not involved in speech but simply defending their workers.

Illustrating the duplicity of the court, consider that by the same 5-4 margin, the justices have determined that while paying Fair Share fees is seen as un-Constitutional, there is nothing wrong with the corporate board rooms politically spending profits – generated by their employees – to advocate against the interests of those very same working people. Clearly a double-standard rooted in empowering the corporate elite and crippling labor unions so that workers can be ever more exploited.

Further, the Janus case represents an attack on workplace democracy. Every union workplace has been created by a carefully-monitored democratic vote of the people who work there. By voting to create the union, workers, through democratic processes, gain control over some of the workplace rules, including the establishment of Fair Share fees.

In imposing nationwide right-to-work, the Supreme Court in this political act has said loudly that they don’t care what the majority of workers want at a workplace. Instead, they have empowered any individual to undo the will of the majority and impose their dissenting view on everyone else who works there. In what world could any of this be seen as fair? Anyone unhappy with the workplace rules, whether imposed by the employer or your fellow employees, can always work somewhere else. No one is forcing him or her to stay.

We should remember that the Constitution’s very purpose was to create a government based on democratic principles and provide a republic where those principles could thrive. But now, we have a five-member Republican majority on the court in decisions like Janus that is attacking democracy and wrongly justifying it on the Constitution through its calculated First Amendment absolutism. We have the spectacle of, as Justice Elena Kagan pointed out in her blistering dissent, “blackrobed rulers overruling citizen choices.”

One wonders if the plutocrats funding such right-wing groups as the Federalist Society (4 of the 5 Republican justices were Federalist Society members) would like it if anybody could just walk in off the street to their country clubs and golf, use the sauna, and drink their alcohol but not have to pay a dime for it. They would certainly be outraged.

And yet this is what the justices are now imposing on the unions. Anybody not wanting to pay for the benefits the union provides can just free load, essentially getting the benefits for nothing and thus stealing from the union members.

These extremist efforts to undermine the labor movement will likely continue. But we have been through this before. Early in the 20th century, with wealthy plutocrats in charge of the government, there was much labor strife and struggle. But then came Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal and that resulted in a new birth for the labor movement and the creation of the middle class.

In accepting the presidential nomination in 1936, FDR criticized the “economic royalists” who had been exploiting the economy and working people for years. FDR spoke in words that are prophetic for our current situation: “It is not alone a war against want and destitution and economic demoralization. It is more than that; it is a war for the survival of democracy.”

FDR’s words fit the challenge that working people face from the political attacks of today’s “economic royalists.” It is a challenge that the labor movement will meet with courage, vigor, and creativity.

John McNay is a professor of History at UC-Blue Ash, the president of the Ohio Conference of AAUP, and the author of Collective Bargaining and the Battle of Ohio: The Defeat of Senate Bill 5 and the Defense of the Middle Class. This op-ed appeared in the July 9, 2018 issue of the Cincinnati Enquirer.