The Koch affiliates intend to keep bringing these suits, like the waves beat against the shoreline. Robert Creamer from Democracy Partners:
An outfit called the "Center for Individual Rights" -- which is a front group for the notorious Koch Brothers financial network and other mega-wealthy right wing CEOs -- has filed a lawsuit asking the U.S. Supreme Court to substantially weaken the ability of working people to negotiate together for better wages and working conditions.
The case will be argued in January. If the court rules in favor of the corporate CEOs, it will turbo-charge their efforts to divert an even greater portion of the country's income into higher pay and bigger bonuses for them and billionaire investors like the Koch's.
It's really quite astonishing when you take a step back and think about it. The CEO and billionaire class has already been so successful in changing the economic rules that they have managed to siphon off virtually all of America's economic growth over the last 15 years. But that just isn't enough. Their greed seems insatiable.
Now they want to make things even worse for ordinary people by making it harder for them to negotiate together to raise their pay.
The case before the court is called Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association.
The law stipulates that when the majority of people vote to form a union, the union is required to represent everyone in the workplace, whether an employee is a union member or not.
It is also settled law that anyone who decides they don't want to be part of the union (a right that all employees have), but who benefits from the agreement on wages and benefits the union negotiates, should contribute their fair share of the cost of negotiating and administering that agreement.
And it is important to know that no one is required to join a union, and therefore no one is required to contribute to the political or lobbying program of a union. Those who elect not be a member only need to pay the cost of the negotiations on their behalf.
Seems only fair, right?
But the Center for Individual Rights, and their corporate CEO backers, want to take away this basic right of working people -- to come together and negotiate as a group in order to secure safe working conditions, and wages and benefits that allow them to support a family.
That basic right benefits the entire community, since if ordinary people have money in their pockets, they turn around and spend it at stores and shops and buy products that create more jobs.
Right now the case is restricted to "public employees," but if they win on this case, you know what's next -- the same restrictions on the rights of workers for all employees.
The lawsuit has been brought for one and only one reason. The Koch Brothers and the other CEOs want to weaken -- and ultimately eliminate -- the rights of workers to ban together into unions and negotiate over wages and working conditions. Then the CEO gang would have unlimited power to pay their workers as little as the market will bear, while keeping as much as possible for themselves.
