Have we finally scraped the bottom of the barrel, or is there no depth to which government unions won’t descend to undermine the rights of the very people they have a legal responsibility to represent?
Several have started refusing to accept certified mail from the Freedom Foundation because they know the packages contain forms government employees have filled out requesting the union cease their membership and deduction of dues.
If not for past experiences with unions claiming to have never received workers’ membership resignation forms, as well as long-delayed processing, there would never have been a need to use certified mail in the first place. These unions continue to earn their reputation for dishonesty, lack of trustworthiness and unethical, illegal tactics.
After accepting certified mail from the Freedom Foundation for 18 months, Teamsters 117 in Washington state got the bright idea to avoid acknowledging workers’ rights to resign their membership by simply refusing to accept the submitted paperwork.
Teamsters 117 must have been giddy about its childish attempt to ignore the rights of the people they are legally required to represent because, in the following months, several more local Teamster and AFSCME affiliates began to follow suit.
Unsure exactly what was going on after the first refusal, an attempt to send certified mail to Teamsters 117 was made using a different return address than the Freedom Foundation. Sure enough, the union accepted the mail.
However, union officials wised up and later refused mail from the alternative name and address we had begun using. So we tried again with no return address at all, and the union again accepted the mail.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Janus v. AFSCME that government unions necessarily engage in political speech and, therefore, public employees cannot be required to fund unions as a condition of employment.
The court also made it clear that proof of consent was required to authorize union dues deductions from employees’ paychecks — no more assuming membership and withholding dues without ever signing a membership form.
Since then, as the Teamsters’ latest scheme shows, it has been two steps forward, one step back for the movement to protect public employees’ right to stop unions from raiding their paychecks.
To get around the need for affirmative consent, government union thugs realized all they needed was to trick public employees into signing membership forms that contained new irrevocability clauses in the fine print limiting the signer’s ability to exercise their rights to cease dues deductions to a short annual escape period.
Still, that doesn’t always work because sometimes people pay attention.
When people are not playing ball with the government unions schemes, sometimes union thugs revert back to their criminal roots and start doing things like forging workers’ signatures and flat-out refusing mail.
Ignoring bills and legal documents does not protect you from your legal responsibilities. We look forward to our day in court to see what a judge thinks about this childish attempt to refuse legal notifications from public employees attempting to exercise their constitutional rights.
