By ART CHANCE

In 2018 the US Supreme Court handed down its decision in Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, AFL-CIO, hereinafter referred to as Janus or Janus v. AFSCME.

At its essence Janus struck down compulsory union dues for public employees as unconstitutional. Unions went into a fit of apoplexy, which could easily have been expected.   Less expected, unless you were some cynical government type like me, was the sight of Republican elected officials shaking in their shoes over the announcement.

The Unions were ready for Janus. A previous case on the same grounds had resulted in a 4-4 decision due to the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. The unions and the Left saw the handwriting on the wall and began to prepare for public employment in the US to become essentially open shop or “right to work.”

In the “blue” unionized states, the unions had willing accomplices in modifying collective bargaining agreements to impose draconian barriers to employees trying to withdraw from union membership. Union stooge Bill Walker was still Alaska’s governor when Janus was handed down and he and the unions quickly reached agreements to protect union prerogatives and keep as many employees as union chattel as possible. 

I don’t know if they’re still doing it, but for months after Janus was handed down, State human resources people were telling new employees they had to go down to the union hall and sign up to pay dues.

The ”red” states have been more problematic. Over the last couple of decades feckless Republicans have allowed collective bargaining and unionization for police, fire, and teachers in many jurisdictions, even though they have no legal right to bargaining. 

But they do have a right to make political contributions and the feckless Republicans can’t pull their hands back. Just look at how the so-called Republicans in the Alaska Legislature behaved and voted last Session and then go look at who they took money from.

When Janus was handed down most any experienced labor relations practitioner would have known what to do. The people I left behind when I retired would have known what to do. Since it was the union-owned Walker Administration obviously nobody asked them or listened to them. All it would have taken was a letter to each union telling them that the U.S. Supreme Court had rendered their union security clauses unconstitutional and that the State would no longer enforce them. You’d offer a polite invitation to them to come bargain the effects.

Instead, the Walker Administration jumped to their masters’ order and entered bargaining with the unions to secure nice safe contracts to get them past the next election and to keep their mandatory dues schemes intact. The union-Walker junta came apart and Mike Dunleavy became governor. There was a chance to get something right.

I met with Dunleavy’s new attorney general in 2019. He’d been in office a month or so, which is long enough to master the org chart, the directory of state officials, and have some clue what your job is. I’ve worked with and for and supervised a fair number of lawyers and admittedly you wondered who dressed some of them for work, but somehow they’d passed the bar exam. I assure you that a bar ticket is not a certification that the holder has any sense. I left that meeting convinced that that attorney general, now long gone, was an idiot. Nothing since has changed my mind. If you’re a cabinet officer. or even a range 20, you don’t compromise your career and your marriage by playing with the front desk clerk.

I wrote a column here in September of 2019, titled, “Which Way is the Courthouse” or some such. 

My proposition was that the Janus case was a federal question that needed to go to the federal courts, yet the Alaska Department of Law had filed in State court.   

Now I’m just a country boy from Georgia who happens to know a bit about labor relations and I know that nothing in the Alaska Public Employment Relations Act offends the Alaska Constitution, but after Janus, a good bit of it offended the US Constitution.

Last week the Alaska Supreme Court handed down its decision and, funny thing, it reads a lot like my column from a couple of years ago: Compulsory dues are just fine under Alaska law; it’s just that Alaska law violates the U.S. Constitution.

The attorney general had a bunch or Range 24 and 25 assistant AGs working for him, one of which I hired. If one of my Range 18 or 20 entry-level Labor Relations Analysts had brought me the legal analysis that led to that appeal to the State courts, at minimum their career indicator light would have been flashing and it might have been worse. Whomever thought that up for the Department of Law was either an idiot or a crook.

So, now the State has lost in the State courts and it would take a whole new start through the federal courts. The State would be unlikely to win in the Alaska District or in the Ninth Circuit, so a resolution is several years and several million dollars away.

Meanwhile, Gov. Dunleavy and his friends are at peace with the unions, sending our dividends to their friends, and dreaming of carbon credits and the State living off Permanent Fund earnings.   

It isn’t a coincidence that he appointed Alice Rogoff-David Rubenstein’s daughter to the Permanent Fund Board. Maybe Dunleavy can go to the U.S. Senate while his trust fund baby buddies set the table here in Alaska.

Art Chance is a retired Director of Labor Relations for the State of Alaska, formerly of Juneau and now living in Anchorage. He is the author of the book, “Red on Blue, Establishing a Republican Governance,” available at Amazon.