New York has passed a bill that proponents claim will keep people from fraudulently impersonating union officials. Its real purpose is to deter nonunion groups from reaching out to union members and informing them of their rights, including the right to withhold union dues.
On the face of it, the state’s Assembly Bill A10835A seems reasonable, even necessary. The legislation prohibits the “impersonation of an employee organization [i.e., a labor union] or an employee representative” of a union. One might assume that some nefarious con-artist group is going around scamming union members. Except there’s no evidence that that’s actually happening.
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The claim that outside groups misrepresent themselves as union officials is false. Tellingly, Governor Kathy Hochul’s press release on signing the bill into law doesn’t point to any such incident. Nor did the remarks of New York Assemblywoman Judy Griffin, the legislation’s chief sponsor.
The law itself doesn’t even require proof. It states that “whenever the attorney general shall believe, from evidence satisfactory to the attorney general, that any person . . . has engaged or is about to engage in the false impersonation of an employee organization or an employee representative, the attorney general may bring an action or proceeding . . . to enjoin such unlawful acts or practices.” Note the “about to engage” part. The attorney general wouldn’t have to provide proof that any deception had occurred, just that it could have happened.
The Freedom Foundation, a free-market nonprofit involved in outreach to union members, has sued the state, arguing that the law tramples on First Amendment speech rights. “A10835A isn’t about protecting anyone. It’s a hit job,” the foundation said. “It exists because government unions in New York are terrified of an inconvenient fact: when public employees learn they don’t have to pay union dues, a lot of them stop.”
Some may wonder why outside groups like the Freedom Foundation inform union members about their rights. The answer is straightforward: many union workers don’t know their rights. Unions have a duty to explain them to workers, but little incentive to do so because they don’t want to lose dues money.
For instance, unions typically don’t tell workers about Beck rights, which allow workers to demand that they be refunded the portion of their membership dues that fund political campaign spending. Nor are unions eager to talk about the 2018 Supreme Court ruling in Janus v. AFSCME that public-sector workers cannot be forced to join a union or pay any dues. Or that private-sector workers in 26 states can opt out of union membership thanks to Right to Work laws.
With New York’s law, union activists are going a step further by trying to silence anyone else from informing workers of their rights.
“This law was designed to keep money in the unions’ pockets and keep their members in the dark,” Erica McDermott, a New York public school teacher, wrote in a Wall Street Journal letter regarding Assembly Bill A10835A. “If New York State United Teachers offers such a great product, why is the union so fearful of a mass exodus?”
Unions can get away with keeping workers in the dark under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), the main federal law covering unions. The law makes unions the “exclusive representative” of workers and their workplace rights. In short, almost everything that involves workplace rights has to be carried out through the union.
The NLRA presumes that if a union exists, it must be the collective voice of the workers it represents. This makes sense in theory but falls apart in practice. Few provisions in the law address conflicts between workers and their unions. No provision, for example, ensures periodic votes to reaffirm that a union retains members’ support. This is true even if a complete turnover of the workforce has happened since the union was established. Workers can decertify their union—but the entity that is supposed to explain this capability to workers is the union itself.
This disconnect can contribute to serious corruption. The United Auto Workers has represented workers for the Big Three U.S. auto companies since the 1940s. In 2020, a Justice Department probe into UAW corruption resulted in the convictions of more than a dozen senior officials, including two former presidents, as part of an embezzlement scheme. The DOJ also forced the union to make the election of its officers more democratic. It shouldn’t take a major corruption scandal for that to happen. Democratic elections should be a requirement for all unions.
Until the NLRA is amended to make unions truly democratic and responsible to their members—proposed legislation like the Employee Rights Act would do that—it falls to the small handful of outside groups like the Freedom Foundation to do the awkward but necessary work of informing workers about what their unions neglect to tell them. New York and other states should not be afraid of workers knowing their rights.