6 Other States Shaped Prop. 75

OLYMPIA, Wash. —  Labor’s political influence in this capital has been under assault since 1992, when Washington became the first state to restrict the use of union members’ dues for campaigns.

The number of teachers who agreed to pay into the Washington Education Assn.’s political action committee has plunged from 48,000 to 7,000.

But the union is hardly enfeebled. In last year’s elections, it donated the maximum allowed to 49 candidates, state records show. Six of the seven candidates for whom the union campaigned won, and the teachers defeated for the third time an initiative intended to allow public charter schools.

“Their influence has increased,” said Bob Williams, a former Republican state senator who helped write the law and now runs a think tank, the Evergreen Freedom Foundation, that has sparred repeatedly with the teachers.

In a quest to change the way labor engages in politics, union critics have achieved victories across the country. Most of those campaigns have been led by a loose confederation of GOP lawmakers, anti-tax activists and state-based think tanks such as Williams’ that receive support from business executives and conservative foundations.

Through their efforts, six states have adopted laws that restrict the way labor union dues can be used. But unions, using aggressive legal challenges and accounting shifts that take advantage of loopholes, have proved adept at stymieing the full effects of the limitations

The unions’ critics hope California will become their greatest victory yet. Voters in the Nov. 8 special election will consider Proposition 75, which would require public employee unions to annually obtain members’ permission before using any of their dues for political campaigns. With the help of groups such as Williams’, the initiative has been crafted to avoid some of the disappointments that proponents experienced in other states.

“I think our measure is pretty tightly drawn,” said Lewis Uhler, the measure’s sponsor and president of the National Tax Limitation Committee.

But aspirations of reining in labor’s influence outside California have proved overly optimistic time and again.

Grover Norquist, an anti-tax activist in Washington, D.C., who has encouraged the campaigns and is an ally of Uhler, predicted in 1998 that “as soon as a Republican president is elected, ‘paycheck protection’ will be signed into federal law.” But the nation’s Republican-dominated capital has not fulfilled that forecast.

Proposals have been defeated in several states, including Oregon and California, which rejected a version in 1998 that would have banned all unions -- public and private -- from using member dues for politics without their consent.

And in states where laws have passed, unions have managed to blunt their effect. Union dues restrictions that passed in Idaho and Ohio are stuck in limbo amid court challenges.

Unions in Michigan and Washington, the first states to pass such measures, are thriving. Despite steep dips in their campaign kitties, they have circumvented the restrictions by rechanneling the ways they use dues money.

In the 2004 elections, the Washington Education Assn. spent $1.4 million, records show. Only a quarter of that came from the political action committee set up for members who volunteered to support political activities; the rest came from the union’s regular budget.

“While they succeeded in pushing through changes in the law, they did not succeed in shutting down members’ voices, as witnessed in our numerous successes in the last election,” said Debra Carnes, the union’s spokeswoman.

Williams blames state regulators and judges for excessively loose interpretations of Washington’s law and legislators for subsequently weakening it further. Several rulings narrowed the law so that it only prohibits unions from diverting a predetermined amount of dues to political efforts. That means that Washington unions face no restriction on spending dues money for political issues that arise over the course of a year.

“What I’ve found over the years is that unions are a business,” Williams said. “They find a way around, under or over any initiative within four years.”

Michigan has required public- and private-employee unions to obtain member approval for using dues on politics since 1994. But unions have been able to remain potent by focusing their money on issue advocacy and get-out-the-vote drives, which are legal uses of dues money.

“To be honest, the law doesn’t work very well,” said Bob Hunter, a management-side labor lawyer who works with the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a Michigan nonprofit that championed that state’s law.

Though the proportion of teachers contributing to the Michigan Education Assn.’s political action committee dropped from 90% to a third, the average donation has grown from $5 to $40, according to Margaret Trimer-Hartley, a union spokeswoman.

“While it is an administrative challenge and we don’t like being compelled by anti-union groups,” she said, “we believe that getting up close and personal with our members is nothing but good for the strength of the organization.”

But taxpayer groups, Republican lawmakers and business-oriented think tanks have refined their latest proposals to make it harder for labor to get around them.

Along with restricting the way dues money is collected, Utah’s Republican-controlled Legislature in 2001 also placed prohibitions on union spending, saying that labor could use money for politics only if it came from a fund of voluntary member donations.

When the law took effect in 2003, the percentage of members contributing to the state teachers union dropped from 68% to 6.8%. The union launched a concerted effort to rally donations; it included a fundraising appeal with the theme of “leader of the PAC,” for political action committee, in which the union’s female president rode into a meeting dressed in leather and a T-shirt that said, “Girls just want to have funds.”

Vik Arnold, the Utah Education Assn.’s political director, said about 20% of its members now contribute to the union. Still, the union’s reserves have dropped from $502,501 at the end of 2003 to $296,326 last month, state records show.

“We face a challenge, and we are doing what we can to rise to that challenge,” Arnold said. “We have no intention of going away.”

Other Utah unions are in worse shape. The Utah Public Employees Assn. emptied its political action committee coffers in last year’s elections and has raised nothing since, records show. The union says it hopes to build its campaign kitty for future elections.

Howard Stephenson, a Republican state senator who sponsored the law, said the Legislature ignored union opposition this year and allowed taxpayer money to be used for special needs students to attend private schools. He said he hopes broader private school voucher will win approval soon.

“Each election, we’re chipping away,” said Stephenson, who is also president of the Utah Taxpayers Assn. He said unions “had a war chest that just never would quit -- until now.”

California’s Proposition 75 would not be as restrictive as Utah’s law, but it is stronger than the ones in the other three states where dues limitations are in effect, according to Michael Reitz, director of the Evergreen Freedom Foundation’s labor policy center.

The proposition would ban public employee unions -- which represent more than 1 million workers -- from giving regular dues money to candidates, initiative campaigns, get-out-the-vote drives with partisan purposes and all other political activities that are regulated by the state. For those activities, unions would have to set up separate funds using voluntary contributions from members.

“In the short term, it would allow the governor and his friends to get their way on all of their issues,” said Lou Paulson, president of California Professional Firefighters.

However, California unions could still use dues to lobby lawmakers, an activity on which public unions have spent more than $11 million so far this year, much of it on ads attacking Schwarzenegger’s legislative agenda. (In comparison, the manufacturing industry and the California Chamber of Commerce spent $12 million on general lobbying.)

Unions could also continue to use dues money to communicate their views on public policy measures to their members and fund public advertisements on issues that do not directly refer to an election.

If the initiative passes, a legal challenge is all but certain. But even if the measure survives, some union observers believe California unions will find ways around it.

“I don’t think it’s going to affect the union power at all,” said Mike Antonucci, a researcher who tracks union political activity nationwide for clients.

“Money is fungible,” he said. “You cut off one avenue to get it and they use another.”

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Dues restrictions

States with union dues restrictions and the years they were approved:

* Washington, 1992

* Michigan, 1994

* Ohio, 1995*

* Idaho, 1997*

* Wyoming, 1998

* Utah, 2001

* Not in effect pending court

challenge.

Source: Evergreen Freedom Foundation

Los Angeles Times