Government Unions Are In Deep Trouble. They Can Only Blame Themselves.

No obscure Supreme Court ruling deserves its obscurity less than Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, the transformational 1977 case in which the justices upheld mandatory dues for public-employee unions. At the time, collective bargaining in the public sector was new, an outgrowth of broader social upheavals, which included 1,400 public-employee work stoppages nationwide between 1965 and 1970. Abood assured these struggling organizations a steady flow of cash, derived ultimately from the same place government gets all its money: taxes.