…. use the case, Harris v. Quinn, to strike down laws in 26 states requiring teachers, police officers, firefighters and other public-sector employees to pay dues to the unions that negotiate contracts on their behalf, even if the workers don’t want to become union members. …

How bad could the Supreme Court decision be for unions? Consider that in the two years after [Wisconsin Gov. Scott] Walker ended compulsory union membership in his state, the American Federation of Teachers lost 65 percent of its statewide members and the National Education Association shrank by 19 percent. Other public-sector unions also took big hits, with revenue plunging by 40 percent or more.

Instead, the ruling was limited in scope, per AP:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court dealt a blow to public sector unions Monday, ruling that thousands of home health care workers in Illinois cannot be required to pay fees that help cover the union’s costs of collective bargaining.

In a 5-4 split along ideological lines, the justices said the practice violates the First Amendment rights of nonmembers who disagree with the positions that unions take.

But if this wasn’t the bombshell that some expected, it still could have major impact in California, where 400,000 state-paid in-home care workers are represented by the SEIU. This month, they’ve been celebrating a huge victory. The state budget for the fiscal year starting Tuesday for the first time allows them to receive overtime.

But we can expect efforts prompted by today’s Supreme Court ruling to get these workers to opt in to union coverage. These efforts could well succeed. As the Wisconsin numbers cited by Politico show, a lot of union-represented workers don’t much like unions.

Alas, the mainstream media coverage of the report features the usual superficiality. There’s no context — no noting that most economists consider heavy taxes a drag on the economy, or that conservative think tanks have documented how California’s tax and regulatory culture is a big reason the Golden State has the nation’s worst poverty rate.

There’s also no contrasting of California and New York. In the Empire State, the liberal governor actually has the intellectual honesty to admit higher taxes damage job creation — and he wants to do something about it. Can we trade Jerry Brown for Andrew Cuomo?

A liberal state with lower taxes than Texas

There’s also this interesting angle: Whenever a libertarian or conservative grouses about how high taxes are in California, a liberal will sneer something along the lines of, “Well, why don’t you go to Texas/Mississippi/Alabama? Low taxes and such a great, great, great lifestyle.”

But it’s not just allegedly benighted Southern states that have far lower taxes than California. For the most striking example, consider Washington state. Its average annual state and local tax tab, according to the new survey, is $3,823. California takes in 150 percent more! Texas takes 34 percent more!

Do Californians have vastly better services than Washington staters? Of course not. Also, most “quality of life” indices put Washington far ahead of California.

One reason WA avoids traps seen in CA: ‘paycheck protection’ law

Why might this be? A key factor is that Washington state voters adopted a law requiring that union members give permission before their dues are used for political advocacy. I wrote about it here:

“Six states have adopted such a reform. Easily the most liberal of the six is Washington, where voters adopted this requirement as part of a popular campaign-reform push in 1992 that was opposed by unions but supported by many union members.

“What followed was a relentless 15-year campaign of subterfuge and sabotage by unions and their Democratic allies in Washington’s legislature and court system. But in 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way for implementation of the law following its original intent.

“Since then, the politics of the state have evolved in interesting ways. While voters embraced gay marriage and the legalization of marijuana in 2012 initiatives, they are increasingly represented by more pragmatic and less ideological Democrats. In spring 2012, such Democrats teamed with minority Republican senators to pass a fiscally conservative state budget. Later in the year, two Democrats decided to caucus with minority Republicans in a coalition running the state Senate in an attempt to force a more centrist course for Washington, which has had Democratic governors continuously since 1985.

“Perhaps these moderating developments would have happened without paycheck protection. But they would have been less likely. In Washington state politics, the same as everywhere, money talks.”

Here’s another survey placing Washington at the low end of taxation.

But for three reasons, I don’t think the prospects for this reform are dead at all. I dealt with the first two in a U-T San Diego column today.

The first: My apologies to Jon Coupal and company, but I really think they were too clever by half with their measure last year:

” … the last time reformers brought paycheck protection before California voters — via Proposition 32 on the November 2012 ballot — they didn’t trust voters enough to just give them a straightforward up-or-down vote on whether union members should have a say on the use of their dues. Instead, the initiative included legally dubious provisions restricting corporate campaign spending that gave critics ample ammunition to depict it as a deceptive power play.

“The measure lost in a landslide. But state voters came fairly close to passing cleaner, simpler versions of paycheck protection in 1998 and 2005.”

The second: There has never been a more egregious case of union power trumping public sentiment than in this year’s Legislature:

“The appalling story of former Los Angeles Unified elementary schoolteacher Mark Berndt would make a simple version of paycheck protection much easier to pass in 2014 or 2016. After evidence turned up indicating Berndt had been feeding sperm to his students, district officials had no choice but to pay Berndt $35,000 to get him to quit because of job protections demanded and won by United Teachers Los Angeles.

“When the Berndt case triggered a public backlash, the state Legislature earlier this year passed a teacher-discipline measure that was billed as a smart way to keep perverts away from students. Instead, it actually gave teachers even more job protections.

“Nothing better illustrates the unions’ chokehold on Sacramento than this. If the CTA and the CFT had less money for political fights, maybe, just maybe, the public would have gotten its way — and parents wouldn’t have cause to think that state lawmakers worry more about protecting predatory teachers than the students of such teachers.”

The third reason is that quite a few veteran state journalists no longer have illusions about how unions have turned governance, especially at the local level, into something akin to looting. It’s no longer just Dan Walters and his occasional contrarian refusal to accept the surface motives claimed by Jerry Brown, Darrell Steinberg and John Perez. Instead, it’s the Bay Area News Group’s increasingly radicalized columnist and editorial writer Daniel Borenstein and a wave of younger reporters at the San Jose Mercury-News, the Sacramento Bee and many online sites.

Even L.A. Times knows which way the wind blows

And even though their concern is always muted, there’s plenty of evidence that the editorial board of the Los Angeles Times is worried, too.

Consider this editorial from last week, headlined “Spend money on the students it’s meant to help.” It makes the same basic point as my CalWatchdog story from three weeks ago about Gov. Jerry Brown’s bid to direct more funds to struggling students being hijacked to put more money in operating budgets for teacher compensation:

“Under the draft rules, if administrators spent all the extra funding on teacher raises, middle-class students would be receiving more of the benefit than needy ones. If those students’ scores rose even slightly, the district could claim it had fulfilled the requirements of the third option.”

If anything puts the spotlight on the gap between union Democrats and real, honest-to-God social-justice Democrats, it is this.

If unions follow up on their Mark Berndt scandal power play by hijacking what’s billed as the most socially progressive education reform in California history, I think opposition to a clean “paycheck protection” bill fades in the newsrooms around the Golden State.

If it doesn’t, God help California. There will be nothing unions can’t get away with.

—  Roger Berkowitz, Executive Director, Hannah Arendt Center

The above quote explains quite well the intrinsic conflict of interest that accrues to public-sector unions. This conflict of interest is the primary distinction between public-sector unions and private-sector unions. It is the reason that private-sector unions can muster strong arguments for their continued relevance in society, whereas the very legitimacy of public-sector unions is questionable.

And lest anyone suggest that calls for reform — if not the abolition — of public-sector unions emanates solely from the “extreme right wing,” consider the provenance of the above quote. The highly regarded, intellectually elite Hannah Arendt Center boasts perhaps the most impeccable nonpartisan, anti-ideological credentials of any comparable institution in the world. It is named after famous political philosopher Hannah Arendt, the author of numerous books, the most famous being “The Origins of Totalitarianism.”

The reason Democrats don’t support public-sector union reform is obvious. There is no special interest in America that donates more money to the Democratic Party than public-sector unions. The data in the table below make this clear. If you go to the source of this data, OpenSecrets.org, you will see that the vast majority of the $535 million contributed to Democrats between 2000 and 2010 came from public-sector unions, whose membership in absolute numbers now exceeds that of private-sector unions.

In California, where public-sector union spending on state and local campaigns and lobbying exceeds $500 million per two-year cycle, the same percentages apply.

Conflicts of interest

Democrats are reluctant to recognize the conflict of interest because the Democratic Party is financially dependent on public-sector unions. It is significant that, on the above table, which covers federal elections and lobbying efforts, corporate contributions are nearly balanced between Democrats and Republicans. If union spending provided a counterweight to corporate spending, as the unions claim, then one could make a case against reform.

But “union spending” is predominantly “public-sector union spending,” and their primary agenda has nothing to do with protecting the rights of private-sector workers. Their agenda has to do with exempting public-sector workers from the economic challenges facing ordinary American workers who have to compete — along with corporations — in the global economy. And corporations, facing a monolithic, self-interested, unionized government, play ball.

Breaking the power of public-sector unions, if not eliminating them altogether, is a prerequisite, ironically, to reforming the financial sector and restoring a competitive corporate environment. It is also a prerequisite to reforming taxpayer-funded, government-administered benefits and entitlements so that all American workers earn them according to the same set of formulas and incentives — regardless of whether or not they work for the government or in the private sector.

Most of the public-sector union reform strategies that have been attempted — successfully or not — have been oriented toward facilitating “opt-out” behavior for government workers. Right-to-work laws allow employees of unionized government agencies to refuse to pay union dues. Most states, even California, permit employees of unionized government agencies to opt-out of paying the political portion of their dues. But these reforms do nothing to stop the overwhelming portion of government union money flowing to Democrats, a partisan strategy on the part of public-sector union leadership that is entirely unrepresentative of their membership.

Party identification

Taking this concept to its logical extreme makes the point clear:  Using very rough numbers, the party identification among America’s government workers nearly mirrors that of the private-sector workers, splitting about one-third each among Democrats, Republicans, and Independents, according to a Gallup poll in 2011.

A successful paycheck protection law would, arguably, result in government political contributions diminishing by one-third — possibly more, depending on the sentiments of independents. That is, instead of diverting, for example, $100 million dollars from the taxpayer-funded government payroll into the coffers of the Democratic party, only $66 million would go there. The Republicans would still get nothing, and the essence of a forcibly politicized government workforce would remain intact.

Other than abolition, speculating over what alternative public-sector union reform strategy might be more effective than “paycheck protection” is dangerous. Paycheck protection laws are similar to Proposition 32 on California’s November 2012 ballot. In the ballot language, it would have prohibited “unions from using payroll-deducted funds for political purposes.” Voters turned it down, 57-43.

But it might be possible to force, through litigation, the allocation of government union political contributions to parties according to the party registration of the union memberships. Once per year, unionized government workers would fill out a form where they would disclose, anonymously, their party registration. A 3rd party agency, perhaps a major public accounting firm, would collect these ballots, collect the political contributions, and allocate the money to the respective parties based on the voting of the members.

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Ed Ring is the executive director of the California Public Policy Center.