It is no secret that the US labor movement is mired in a seemingly endless decline. The overall rate of unionization reached its peak in the early 1950s, when roughly one-third of the workforce was organized. Today, the rate is 10.7 percent, the lowest level in a century. But a focus on the overall rate masks important differences in the fates of private and public sector unions, which are governed by separate legal regimes. Unionization in the private sector has plummeted from roughly one-quarter in the 1970s to a harrowing 6.5 percent today. By contrast, public sector unionization has remained fairly constant, hovering around 35 percent since the early 1980s. Local government unionization still tops 40 percent, and some states and cities boast Nordic rates of public employee union membership.¹

This split between private and public sector unions has had dire consequences for the labor movement as a whole. It prevented the consolidation of a truly national labor movement and put the two sectors on fundamentally different developmental paths. As private sector unions eroded, public sector unions were increasingly vulnerable to political and ideological attack.² A day of reckoning was bound to arrive, and it finally did in the shape of a recent Supreme Court case called Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees.

On its face, Janus took up the arcane question of “agency fees” and their constitutionality in state and local government employment.³ The plaintiff, a former Illinois child-support worker named Mark Janus, argued that such fees violated his First Amendment right to free speech and free association. Backed by a constellation of right-wing legal outfits, he claimed that collective bargaining in the public sector is inherently political, and that public employees should not be required to pay dues or fees to an organization whose political activities they disagree with. Therefore, the public sector “agency shop” that prevailed in Illinois and many other states must be abolished and replaced with a so-called “right to work” regime in public employment nationwide. ⁴