Labor: Preparing for Bad Times
By 
This article on SEIU’s budget cuts confirms what my own internal sources at the union have told me: it is cutting back big time because Friedrichs II is on the way and is going to ravage public sector unionism.
“After spending big on Clinton, Obama, SEIU now facing steep budget cuts,” the Free Beacon published, referencing a recently posted federal filing and launching a flurry of aggregated posts.
But connecting those events — SEIU’s support of Democratic politicians and its upcoming cuts — is misleading, said Joseph Slater, a labor-focused professor at the University of Toledo’s College of Law.
“This isn’t a union financially in trouble because of money spent on the election,” Slater said. “That money was budgeted for the election, and the SEIU has a long history, as do most other labor unions, of supporting candidates.”
Rather, he said, the union is bracing for a monetary blow in the near-future — brought on, in part, by Trump’s Supreme Court pick.
Judge Gorsuch, who was sworn in this week, could cast the deciding vote in a case that concerns whether public sector unions can collect “agency fees” from workers who don’t want to bankroll the union’s political activities. One such case in Illinois could land before the court as early as this year.
By spending freely, one of the things meant is the Fight for $15. People have talked about this as a new frontier in union activism (as well as for the side of the labor movement that hates BIG EVIL PURPLE it’s another sign of SEIU perfidy). But this also costs a lot of money and SEIU really doesn’t get anything in return in terms of member dues. Actually organizing a McDonald’s is something that has never been done. So how much can the union serve as a bank account for outside efforts with no pay off, even if they are socially the right thing to do?