Statement by National Right To Work Committee President Reed Larson Regarding Campaign-Finance 'Reform'

FOR RELEASE: March 1, 2001

The McCain-Feingold Bill (S. 27) launches a two-pronged attack on ordinary citizens' right to voluntary participation in the political process.

As spokesmen for a number of respected grass-roots lobbying groups have pointed out, McCain-Feingold imposes sweeping new regulations on citizens' freedom to express and to listen to opinions about candidates for federal office.

In recent years, countless editorial writers and other commentators have persuasively argued in favor of more voluntary grass-roots involvement in the political process.

Far from furthering this worthy objective, this legislation does the opposite.

In fact, the key McCain-Feingold provisions on which I'll be focusing here trample on employees' First Amendment freedom to choose which candidates they support, financially or otherwise.

These provisions increase Organized Labor's statutory power to funnel workers' forced union dues into electioneering and lobbying activities.

Of course, Organized Labor's political abuse of forced union dues and "fees" is not a new problem.

For decades, federal law has authorized union officers to get millions of workers, union members and nonmembers alike, fired if they refuse to pay an average of $600 apiece annually into union treasuries to keep their jobs.

And this past federal election year, an estimated $800 million from union treasury funds was ultimately funneled into Big Labor's partisan phone banks, get-out-the-vote drives, propaganda mailings, etc.

$800 million is actually a conservative estimate.

Private-sector union staff salaries alone exceed $2.4 billion a year.

And union officials themselves have tacitly conceded that last year at least a third of their paid staff time was spent on political campaigns.

In January, several AFL-CIO officials told The New York Times that's the reason affiliated unions tugged at least 200,000 fewer new workers into unions in 2000 than in 1999.

As veteran labor reporter Steven Greenhouse summarized their admission, "[U]nions organized fewer members last year because they threw so much money, energy and manpower into electoral politics."

Thirteen years ago the Supreme Court sought with the Beck decision to curb forced-dues politicking. However, union officials have obstructed all but a small minority of workers from asserting their Beck rights.

Tens of thousands of objecting workers are currently getting relief under Beck and other related Supreme Court decisions, while the potential universe of objectors is many times greater.

According to one recent opinion poll, 60% of union-"represented" workers simply don't want any of their dues spent on politicking, period.

That in itself suggests that nearly five million of the eight million private-sector forced dues payers are now being denied their rights.

McCain-Feingold would actually exacerbate this problem by gutting workers' legal rights under Beck.

It would punch open a gaping loophole in Beck by authorizing confiscation of objecting workers' dues for politicking that is "related" to union officials' role as employees' exclusive bargaining agents.

This potentially denies workers the right to object to abuse of their forced dues for almost any kind of politics or lobbying, since union lawyers have always insisted all such activities are somehow "bargaining-related."

Furthermore, McCain-Feingold would effectively strip federal courts, which have protected tens of thousands of employees' rights under Beck, of any jurisdiction over the decision.

It would transfer all Beck cases to federal bureaucrats at the National Labor relations Board (NLRB), who under both GOP and Democratic administrations have displayed an ingrained bias against workers who assert their Beck rights.

Together, these changes would help union officials make their forced-dues political juggernaut even bigger!

At the same time, McCain-Feingold would hamstring efforts by the National Right to Work Committee® and other grass-roots groups to counterbalance Organized Labor's political machine.

As many polls have shown, Americans oppose federally-imposed forced unionism by at least a three-to-one margin. Millions of these forced-unionism foes are passionate about the issue and can be mobilized to act on it.

Therefore, the Committee's most effective weapon against union political operatives is simply to inform millions of citizens where their candidates stand on forced unionism.

As several other grass-roots leaders are explaining in detail at today's news conference regarding McCain-Feingold, this bill comes down hard on such informational programs.

Overall, McCain-Feingold would tilt the electoral playing field even further in favor of the very union officials whose forced-dues politicking is now the chief source of corruption in American politics.

Any true campaign finance-reform package must begin with the National Right to Work Act, which would abolish the coercive labor-law provisions that fuel Big Labor's illicit political activities.

But until true reform can be enacted, the good of the nation demands that phony and harmful "reforms" such as McCain-Feingold be stopped.