As I've written here repeatedly throughout this year's election cycle, the fight over California's Proposition 32 -- which would, amongst other things, prevent unions from using member dues for political purposes without a member's consent -- is being treated as an existential threat by big labor in the Golden State. And when the unions believe themselves imperiled, they'll stop at nothing to crush the opposition (as I noted in a City Journal piece earlier this year, the California Teachers' Association went so far as to mortgage its Sacramento headquarters in order to come up with money to defeat Arnold Schwarzenegger's 2005 reform initiatives). And indeed, the newest figures on donations to the No on 32 campaign show a labor establishment gearing up for the political battle to end all political battles.
From the Sacramento Bee's "State Worker":
With two weeks remaining before Election Day, the donations to the labor-backed campaign committee to defeat Proposition 32 have reached $61 million.
Unions have made killing the measure their top priority, worried that if it becomes law that its ban on money from payroll deductions for political activities would handcuff their influence by choking off their sole source of funding.
The unions may rarely be right on the merits of policy issues, but their political wisdom is second to none. They know that losing the coercive power that allows them to maintain a political empire on the backs of unwilling workers would begin the erosion of their unchallenged dominance of California politics. And they're all in.The top three contributors to the anti-32 campaign have given half the money raised so far: the California Teachers Association ($20.1 million), Service Employees International Union ($8.8 million) and American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees ($3.8 million).
The question now is which is the greater force in the Golden State: the financial resources of the unions or the growing sense among the voters that the labor establishment -- once supposedly the ally of the common man -- has become a nest of plutocracy?
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