Anyone who imagined their elected leaders could competently manage the COVID outbreak or any of the myriad crises with which the U.S. is currently afflicted hasn’t been paying attention to their handling of an even more insidious government epidemic, bureaucratic red tape.
The establishment’s games, evasions and complicated rules cost all of us dearly. Casual complaining around the dinner table or over radio airwaves surely can’t begin to do justice to the true price these government-induced obstacles impose on the American people in both time and treasure.
Consider, for example, the question of government transparency. Government officials, elected and otherwise, ensure us, “We have nothing to hide. We’re an open book.”
And yet the public records you requested six months ago still haven’t delivered.
Why? Any flimsy answer such as, “That financial information doesn’t exist in a format we can access” gets the provider off the hook.
Americans in every walk of life have been, at the very least, inconvenienced by the endless buck-passing. Positive answers, outcomes and results hoped and prayed for are met with the dreaded, “But this box wasn’t checked.”
Public employees who refuse to fund government unions with their paychecks encounter the ultimate runaround. Doubletalk from union bosses and political leaders alike leave them trapped in a never-ending cycle of paying union dues.
The lucky ones eventually reach out to the Freedom Foundation for help.
Their union membership and union voting privileges are typically terminated with little argument, but when it comes to ending their dues payments, despite being required to under the U.S Constitution unions and their allies in government routinely respond with stonewalling.
Why? Read the fine print in your union membership agreement and you’ll find it’s filled with exceptions and loopholes intended to undermine the clear intent of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2018 ruling in Janus v. AFSCME, which identified forced union membership or dues as a violation of the worker’s First Amendment rights.
A Columbus, Ohio, city employee, subject to an American Federal State County Employees (AFSCME) collective bargaining agreement, has been closely corresponding with the Freedom Foundation’s Ohio team for eight long months, during which the union has stubbornly refused to cease his dues deductions.
To beat the union at its own game, the Freedom Foundation and the worker carefully coordinated to ensure the state AFSCME boss, the local union president, the local union treasurer and the city payroll administrator would all receive a dues-termination notice by certified mail.
And within the allowable annual 10-day opt-out window.
Sleight of hand, designed for the union’s self- and wealth-preservation, will no longer supersede his First Amendment rights.
The fine print will no longer obligate him to pay union dues.
He refuses to be a victim any longer.
