| By Richard Myers - Oct 6th, 2008 at 4:03 pm EDT |
| Also listed in: Corporate Accountability |
Johne at SquareState has blogged about how deceptive and injurious this amendment would be to Colorado's working people.
Amendment 47 says:
Shall there be an amendment to the Colorado constitution concerning participation in a labor organization as a condition of employment, and, in connection therewith, prohibiting an employer from requiring that a person be a member and pay any moneys to a labor organization or to any other third party in lieu of payment to a labor organization and creating a misdemeanor criminal penalty for a person who violates the provisions of the section?
The tricky or sneaky part of that is that mandatory union membership is already illegal in every state according to the Taft Hartley Act of 1947. Before this bill, unions could have closed shop agreements where every employee had to be a member of the union. The next step down is simply called a union shop, where new employees usually have 30 days to become members of the union. Then there are agency shops where not everyone is required to join the union but they do have to pay some amount of fees or dues to the union for their representation. However, federal law allows non members to have money meant for political purposes to be refunded. That doesn't sound so bad does it? If you don't want representation then don't join the union. Isn't that what Amendment 47 would do? Nope. According to many documents and case files, unions are required to represent all employees of the company with which there is an agreement whether that employee is a member of the union or not. This is spelled out most clearly by this document from the Legal Aid Society of San Francisco. Considering that the language of Amendment 47 does not at all address changes to this provision, know as "duty of fair representation", we must assume this would remain intact.
(this is an excerpt; please see the full article at: http://www.squarestate.net/diary/6785/why-you-should-vote-no-on-amendment-47 )
In effect, the amendment would change the law so that a group of members could terminate their memberships and continue to receive union benefits without paying for it. Johne says "[t]his, in effect, creates union free-loaders." If enough members did this, they would create a crisis that could threaten the financial well-being of the union.
But this also means that any company might find ways to undermine the union, simply by screening new hires. Colorado Amendment 47 could therefore be a trojan horse, a union buster that dramatically upsets the balance between business and labor.
I spent some time this past weekend talking to Denver voters about Amendment 47. I was pleased to learn that a fair number of people are already aware of the amendment, and plan to vote against it. It doesn't seem to matter whether they're Democrats, Republicans, or Independents, there were a lot of people unhappy that this one is on the ballot once again.
Some folks have set up a website to get the truth out about Amendment 47:
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