By Victor Skinner
EAGnews.org

CHICAGO – Several Wisconsin public employees continue to fight for Act 10, pleading their case in U.S. District Court to reinstate provisions thrown out earlier this year.

The latest action came this week when Pleasant Prairie teacher Kristi Lacroix, Waukesha high school teacher Nathan Berish and Wisconsin Department of Employee Trust Funds worker Ricardo Cruz filed a brief in the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals urging the court to uphold all of Gov. Scott Walker’s Act 10 reforms.

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“The workers, who are forced to accept ‘representation’ of union officials, want instead to represent themselves with their employers. The workers are challenging the lower court judge’s ruling striking down Wisconsin’s new union recertification requirements and the ban on the use of taxpayer funded payroll systems to collect union dues for general employees …” the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation wrote in a recent release.

In March, U.S. District Judge William M. Conley upheld much of Gov. Scott Walker’s Act 10 – which removed most collective bargaining privileges from most public employees – but struck down requirements for public sector unions to recertify every year by an absolute majority. Conley also scratched Act 10’s ban on automatic union dues deductions collected using taxpayer resources.

As a result of Act 10, more than a dozen of the state’s collective bargaining units failed to recertify, and numerous local unions, including teachers unions, did not even attempt to do so. That’s because union officials know that they likely couldn’t meet the threshold for recertification – which required at least half of the employees to vote in favor of recertification.

In the aftermath of Act 10, unions attempted to voluntarily collect dues from their members, but in many cases fell far short of previous years’ revenue.

By refusing to voluntarily paying their dues, public employees sent a strong message to union bosses who had forced them under their thumb and dipped into their paychecks without permission. Public sector union membership began to slide after Act 10 passed.

“Workers stated in their initial brief in the district court that ‘they equate the “services” provided by (union officials) to be akin to those of some itinerant street window washers who sling dirty water on your car windshield, smear it around, then demand payment’ and do not feel the state should be the bagman for union officials,” the NRTWLDF reports.

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In other words, many public employees, including teachers, never asked to be part of a union, don’t support their union’s partisan politics or ruthless negotiating tactics, and will not voluntarily pay union dues or fair share fees. For the Wisconsin Education Association Council, and many of Wisconsin’s other public-sector unions, the case is crucial because they know that without the ability to forcefully take their dues, they will dwindle into irreverence.

Lacroix, Berish and Cruz want the U.S. appeals court to uphold Act 10 as constitutional, and are relying on the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Davenport vs. WEA, in which the high court justices unanimously agreed that while union bosses have an “extraordinary power” to force workers to pay dues, they have no constitutional right to use public resources to do it, NRTWLDF reports.

National Right to Work President Mark Mix offers another solution for putting Wisconsin’s public-sector unions in their place.

“No worker should ever be forced to pay union dues or fees as a condition of employment, which is why Wisconsin should go a step further by passing Right to Work protections to protect all Badger State employees from forced union affiliation,” he said.