THE TWO-FACED JANUS ATTACK ON HAWAIIAN LABOR
Can We Work Together?
By David Arthur Walters
PRESS INDEPENDENT
July 6, 2018
A legal bulwark protecting labor from predatory capitalism has collapsed due to the ideological prejudices of a narrow right-wing majority of United States Supreme Court justices sworn to do justice under the people’s law instead of making their own laws. The June 27, 2018, ruling for the plaintiff, Mark Janus of Illinois, in Janus v. American Federal of County and State Employees, now allows untold numbers of non-union public workers who enjoy the benefits of collective bargaining in over twenty states to choose not to pay union dues thus abrogating state laws that mandate they pay their fair share. The decision designed to starve union members of their just deserts is widely celebrated as a victory by the propaganda organs dedicated to conserving private capitalism.
The Two-Faced Janus Case decision is expected to have an especially heavy impact on Hawaii’s powerful public unions. Many of the Aloha State’s lowly paid public employees are teachers dedicated to assimilating freeborn and naturally unruly children into the prevailing political-economic order so they may believe they are getting what they deserve even if that happens to be the short end of the stick.
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| Michael Lilly with his spouse Cindy Walter |
“I think it the impact will be major,” said Michael Lilly, a prominent Hawai`i attorney and former state attorney general.
”We have a number of public unions. This last year a drove of teachers left Hawai`i because of the cost of living and lousy salaries. Being allowed to decline paying union dues is not chump change to poorly paid teachers. By the way, poor pay does not equate to insufficient money. The Department of Education is an inverted pyramid. Most of the money goes to the huge administrative state and not to the schools and teachers. Bad.”
As a matter of fact, droves of locals including those with a quota of Native Hawaiian blood have been leaving the islands over the years, forced out by the state’s notoriously low wages and exceedingly high cost of living.
How would Mr. Lilly, a fiscal conservative, make sure public employees could afford the mounting price for living in paradise?
“I have no answer to that, but at least their pay will increase by the amount of dues rejected.”
Mr. Lilly, who specializes in commercial, personal injury, and wrongful termination litigation, said he has had numerous people contact him about union issues, and that he has represented people who were hurt by or were given no meaningful help, for example, by the teachers’ union.
“When teachers are having difficulty making ends meet,” he said, “belonging to a union or paying dues is a non-starter. Teachers generally have very positive feelings about their job and students, but feel hamstrung by the bureaucracy of both the state and the unions.”
He noted that hard-strapped teachers were at one time buying pencils so their students would have them, but the union stopped it.
More recently, in the case of a false nuclear attack alarm in Hawai`i, it was claimed that public safety and national security were endangered by a public union and the government, always convenient scapegoats for social ills. The hapless bungler with the local version of FEMA, the gentleman who had pushed the wrong button and whose lawyer has recently threatened to file a defamation suit amid revelations that other crucial public workers were sleeping on the job, claimed that the reports of his previous mistakes, attributed to an alleged mental aberration, were inaccurate.
We recall that mainstream media had a field day. Unthinkable nuclear war was thinkable and almost probable according to armchair generals in the know. North Korea’s Kim Jung Un had been threatening a nuclear attack on the United States for weeks. President Donald Trump, thumping his chest to make America greater than it was during the Great War and its sequel, responded in turn, belittling Kim Jong Un by calling him ‘Rocket Man,’ threatening to unleash a fury the likes of which has never been seen before, a holocaust that would literally incinerate his renegade nation.
Do not laugh retrospectively. It was not fake news. People absorbed by the news may act out their worst fears. America could be great again if it blew North Korea to smithereens.
A journalist who worked briefly in Hawaii and is now with a major conservative paper on the Mainland fell back on a version of the old Dumb Hawaiian routine, attributing the error to a government that rewards incompetence. Naturally the unions, which were organized to protect workers from the depredations of greedy haole colonists, are to blame for that. No doubt unions must be emasculated and government subjected to big business. Never mind all the bungling that goes on in business. Business: good. Unions: bad.
Capt. Michael Lilly, USN (Ret.), a decorated Vietnam War veteran whose great grandfather filled high offices in the Kingdom of Hawai`i, admits that he was born fortunate thanks to the involvement of his ancestors in sugarcane plantations. Yet he risked it all in Vietnam as a surface warfare officer and then committed himself to further serve the public in the public and private practice of law according to the highest standards of the organized bar. He has appeared twice before the U.S. Supreme Court, most recently to win a decision on Constitutional grounds that prevented Native Hawaiians with a minimum quota of native blood from forming a tribe in order to obtain special benefits similar to those enjoyed by Native Americans or American Indians on the continent. Hawai`i, mind you, was a Kingdom, not a “tribe,” a nation with several classes of citizens including white businessmen who overthrew the Kingdom. Now the majority of Native Hawaiians prefer, as American citizens, the American benefits and rights to those provided by the overthrown monarchy, although they might want to have more of them since they appear to be shortchanged in terms of equity.
Now Mr. Lilly agreed wholeheartedly with the Court’s decision in Janus.
“It is the fault of justices not staying faithful to the words of the constitution and deciding cases more on ideology than constitutional principles. I view the Janus majority as being faithful to the words. The decision was grounded in the first amendment rights to free speech and association. I don’t see it as anti-union nor do I think the fact that it involved a public union had anything to do with the decision other than it was the basis for finding state action, thereby triggering the first amendment rights. That’s being faithful to the words. I do see the dissent as not being faithful to the words. If you don’t like the Janus decision the constitution contains a method to change its words. Those changes belong to the people, not activist judges. It was the people who voted to adopt the constitution and it is for the people to decide whether to change it.”
It is a natural law that both sides of the dispute believe they are being faithful in to a few words in the national fulcrum for controversy, the U.S. Constitution, which happens to include the Bill of Rights although some of the founders did not believe the inclusion of inalienable rights was necessary because everyone knew what their English rights were.
The Court in Janus noted that the Constitution does not provide for deduction of collective bargaining costs from non-union members. We add that neither does the Constitution provide for a right to abortion or gay marriage, or, for that matter, a myriad of rights that people take for granted for decades until the Supreme Court happens to deprive them of those rights by reversing its precedents, which it claims it has self-created right to do; a supreme right that is in itself is ideally, as far as the court is concerned, irreversible, although arguably unconstitutional because the Constitution provides Congress with the power to limit the appellate jurisdiction of the judicial branch.
The Supreme Court’s arrogation is peculiar to American jurisprudence otherwise based on English and Roman law. The legislative power has been sovereign over the judicial since ancient times, but a balancing act between supposedly equally independent branches has taken place here, resulting in what Thomas Jefferson fervently protested against: a tyrannical, unelected oligarchy reigning supreme over government.
Americans have become so accustomed to the arrogation that they forget that Justice must be well behaved or impeached. And she is obviously no longer blind, at least not to ideology, which has become, as John Adams termed it, “idiotology.” The people themselves have become so blinded by the obscurities jurists have dressed her up in that a new conspiracy theory has arisen, that a secret English cabal called ‘The Crown’ is afoot behind the curtains.
No, the slimmest majority and minority of the Supreme Court in Janus were not faithful to a few words, but were, rather, faithful to their respective ideological interpretations according to the fearful “conservative” or fearless “liberal” prejudices of their class and social status.
Keli'i Akina, Ph.D., a fiscal conservative who is an elected Trustee for the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, and is the president and CEO of Hawaii’s influential Grassroot Institute, said in a press release that Hawaii’s policymakers had anticipated the Janus decision.
“In April, Gov. David Ige signed HB 1725, which will allow government employees a 30-day period once a year in which they can opt out of paying union dues…. If Hawaii lawmakers choose to address the Janus decision, they will have to do so with the knowledge that the Court found the free-rider argument insufficient to overcome the First Amendment concerns. They will have to approach the issue in a way that balances Hawaii’s longstanding union tradition with the civil liberty considerations brought forth in the ruling. E hana kakou (Let’s work together!)”
The Congress is obviously not “working together.” The President, elected by a disgruntled populist minority, has worked to divide the nation in the most vicious way short of civil war, a calamity predicted by alarmists who have called for the impeachment of the President and the ousting of reactionary crackpots in Congress.
Hawaii’s “longstanding union tradition” is the outcome of the importation of indentured sugarcane workers from Asia who were treated as virtual slaves, but who eventually managed to painfully organize themselves into unions and cast off the yoke of their Caucasian masters, who were themselves “haoles” i.e. foreigners, and had violently overthrown the native kingdom to Christianize i.e. “civilize” the “heathen,” establish a military outpost for the advance of their jingoistic goals in the Pacific, and profit from the abundance of the seized land. The heirs of the conquerors gaze fondly yet fearfully hence conservatively over their estates because the liberal natives in want of a just liberty are always restless.
The public unions in Hawai`i, prematurely assured of their perpetuity, rested too much on their laurels, and became stagnant and lazy despite the good work of many members. Oh yes, it is said, everyone knows that it takes three union members to screw in a light bulb on the Mainland. It takes five in Hawai`i, in Hawai`i time, with five government bureaucrats watching over them.
Both union management and the government itself deserve some blame. The same tradition of resistance against the haoles that rendered the unions powerful weakened the government that employs public workers yet is dependent on them. Together the unions and the government in a sort of unholy bureaucratic alliance form a bulwark against outsiders as well as internal reformers among the overlords, the vested interests. In that regard, the locals are indeed “working together.”
On the other hand, Mr. Akina’s slogan, “Let’s work together,” may be interpreted, in its “free market” or “libertarian” sense, to mean “Let’s work without unions so that labor can be dominated by management beholden to the power elite.” And one might add that “Let’s work together” also means “to work without any government besides the one that we own lock, stock, and barrel.” Above all, the divine right to the dominate share of Property, upon which all right is predicated, must be conserved.
That is the underlying motive of the conservative Supreme Court justices in the notorious Janus decision notwithstanding the rationalizations of a foregone conclusion after the appointment of a conservative judge threw the wreath to the conservatives.
We all really wish we could work together, work without the idiotology that divides us into Republican and Democrat, conservative and liberal, or other hostile camps and categories. We say we want identity and integrity, wherefore we wall our estates off and wage war to make peace. We should be tearing down walls instead of erecting them.
Our regressive divisions over a few words and lots of property may render it impossible to progress together short of war or revolution. We hope that progress is a spiral, so what we have here is a temporary reversal. If not, civilization shall be damned by the doom of the highest court of all.
xYx
My background is in higher education. Among professors, unions were looked down upon, because universities were generally run by the professorate, with the power of tenure and other rules to continue toward excellence and achievement in all fields of study. So, the professorate has been unprepared to meet the challenge that conservative administrations have brought upon the public higher education systems in the states.
Similar to what you have described, gradually the administrations of universities have grown and prospered while the professorate has diminished in power and pay. Coaches have become the highest-paid university employees, and professors of philosophy and other liberal studies the lowest. Professors are being stripped of their tenure and fired. And tenure-track professorships are declining. I read recently where 70% of the teachers in higher education are now adjunct contractors with no benefits who teach by the term and course. They average less than $20,000 per year even though some of them may have multiple degrees and doctorates. After all that investment in their education. Many are itinerant workers, working below the poverty line and having to move every year to a new university because they cannot find permanent employment.
The decisions being made by the Supreme Court in the next 20 years may bring the country to civil war. Unless a way can be found so that ordinary workers in all fields of work can be given a living wage, even a superior wage like my father, a truck driver, got from the Teamsters Union, enabling him to retire at 62, the walls that are being thrown up will be breached by those with nothing but pitchforks and angry voices.
Ron