Proposition 75 isn’t about the on-going power struggle between the Governor and the unions. It’s bigger than that. It is about allowing union workers to have the political and financial freedom to choose what they support and where they offer their support. It is about granting this right initially to the workers without forcing them to encounter tiresome paperwork with roundabout solutions.
The “Paycheck Protection Act” allows unions workers to give consent to where their money goes, politically, when they sign their contract. Why is it that millions of union dollars go toward political fundraising to support views not necessarily held by the whole union? Just because the commercials on TV are plagued by teachers, police officers, nurses, and firefighters condemning Governor Schwarzenegger, doesn’t mean all union workers hold this view.
The unions hold a powerful voice over California’s legislator. The unions are now threatened by Proposition 75 because if this passes, it may turn their powerful voice over the legislator into a gentle whisper. It’s about time that unions realize their place isn’t in Sacramento and that the legislator isn’t bound to push the unions’ political agenda. If union workers cared about the political freedoms of their workers, not their political influence, they wouldn’t be fighting so vehemently in opposition to Proposition 75.
Union workers are at least entitled to choose, to choose where, politically, their money goes, to choose what they support, and to choose whether or not they want their hard-working money to sustain the unions’ political agenda.
Julie Dlugokecki