The Racist Agenda Behind the Now-Dead ‘Friedrichs’ Supreme Court Case

[marmar]

(In These Times) The Supreme Court has voted 4-4 on Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, and thus the case is—for now, at least—dead. We should all breathe a sigh of relief: Friedrichs would have made it harder for public service workers—nurses, teachers, firefighters and more—to negotiate good wages and benefits. The two groups that will lose the most are women and African Americans.

If the case’s plaintiffs would have won, our economy, already tilted sharply in favor of the super-rich, would have become even more imbalanced. Public sector workers would have received all of the benefits of union membership without having to pay anything for the cost of representation that unions are required to provide by law. “Right to work” would have become the law of the land in the public sector.

Behind Rebecca Friedrichs, the teacher from California who was one of 10 plaintiffs in the case, is the Center for Individual Rights (CIR), which actively sought out potential plaintiffs to bring suit against the teachers union—just as it aggressively recruited white students on college campuses to bring anti-affirmative action lawsuits against their universities, most notably in Hopwood v. Texas and Gratz v. Bollinger. CIR is also on record in opposition to hate-crime legislation, voting rights and the Affordable Care Act—while championing the cause of payday lenders, which prey on poor communities and communities of color around the country.

CIR has received funding from the Pioneer Fund, a foundation classified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group that funds and studies eugenics, the racist “science” of breeding superior human beings. The foundation also supports anti-immigration groups that share its hate-group classification. ............(more)

http://inthesetimes.com/article/18868/the-racist-agenda-behind-friedrichs

[1StrongBlackMan]

1. I, so, wish a member of the California Legislature would ...

draft a "Freedom to Negotiate" bill, where public employees could opt out of paying union dues; but by doing so, they would be opting out of the terms of the union negotiated contract terms (i.e., wages, benefits, terms and conditions of employment, etc.).

Those opting out would, then, be free to negotiate their own terms and conditions of employment, individually.

I'm pretty certain these workers would soon discover, the minimal amount in union dues they pay, are more than made up for, when they become At-will employees (i.e., no job security), with no due process rights, and are provided "whatever the market will bear" wages and benefits ... while finding themselves with zero bargaining leverage.

You can't fix myopic stupid; but, you can allow the stupid to fix it themselves ... after the bleeding stops and bruising heals.