Portside

Internal documents obtained by the Guardian reveal a nationwide drive to persuade union members to quit and stop paying dues.

I’m nervously awaiting the Supreme Court ruling in Janus v. AFSCME Council 31, which would weaken public sector unions by letting workers receive the benefits of representation without contributing toward the cost. But I’ve got a unique vantage point: I work in the same building as the plaintiff.

Republicans on and off the bench are moving to kill unions. But millennials—the most pro-union generation since the 1930s—may yet find a way to organize.

Union organizers in states like Tennessee are hoping to change that. Since 2010, the number of union members in Tennessee has grown from 115,000 to 155,000. Still, only 5.7 percent of Tennessee workers are members of a union.How To Patrick Green, even one new member is a big deal. Green is a president of Local 1235, which is part of the Amalgamated Transit Union in Nashville, Tennessee. In the three years that he has been leading the union, the local’s membership rate went up by 36 percent, despite being in a right-to-work state.

“The Catholic bishops of the United States have long and consistently supported the right of workers to organize for purposes of collective bargaining,” a U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops says.brief says. “Because this right is substantially weakened by so-called ‘right-to-work’ laws, many bishops - in their dioceses, through their state conferences, and through their national conference - have opposed or cast doubt on such laws, and no U.S. bishop has expressed support for them.”

Unfortunately, for the special interest groups that are pushing this agenda, the ramifications of a win will have the opposite of the desired effect. If not bargaining is protected free speech, then bargaining will conversely be protected free speech, giving union workers new protections that we’ve never enjoyed before.

Millions of public-sector workers could soon be targeted by conservative groups trying to dissuade them from paying union fees. Co-published by International Business Times.