In a 45-page brief filed in Federal Court last Friday, Operating Engineers Local 150 shot Big Labor in the foot by taking the bold and truly original legal stance that Indiana’s new Right to Work law is unconstitutional on the grounds it denies the union its “right of political free speech” as established by Citizens United. The union claims that cutting off the flow of forcibly collected dues restricts the union’s ability to act politically, because unions spend a significant percentage of dues collected in non-Right to Work states on politics. “In this case, the state of Indiana restricted a channel of speech-supporting finance,” the union brief maintains. “The union legitimately utilizes dues money collected through the agency shop provisions in its collective bargaining agreements, in part, to finance political speech. The Indiana Right to Work law prohibits agency shop agreements, and that prohibition restricts a channel through which speech-supporting finance might flow.” You read that right. The union is claiming the constitutional right to “speech supporting finance” and those same rights be damned if claimed by those unionized workers shaken down for union political spending. By finally going on the record that unions do indeed use forcibly collected money to fund the partisan extremist political free speech of a handful of union officials, Operating Engineers Local 150 makes the most powerful case to date for federal Right to Work legislation.
