While tabling at the Clark County Government Center in Las Vegas, some colleagues and I were doing something unions apparently find increasingly dangerous: giving public employees the facts.

We were talking to workers about the voluntary nature of union dues, their rights, and the ways unions spend the money extracted from rank-and-file members — including political and ideological activity that many of those workers may know absolutely nothing about.

That was when SEIU 1107’s organizing director and another woman wearing SEIU garb approached our table and accused us of lying.

According to their organizing director, we were misleading workers by telling them union dues were being spent politically because, as he insisted, the law simply does not allow it.

There was only one problem.

I knew better.

And unlike the regurgitated talking points being thrown at us, I came armed with receipts.

I pulled up SEIU’s own LM-2 financial disclosure report and put the union’s numbers directly in front of him.

Not our numbers.

Not Freedom Foundation numbers.

SEIU’s numbers.

Suddenly, the conversation became much more difficult.

His response was essentially that COPE was the only vehicle through which SEIU could engage in political spending and that the union was bound by regulations preventing dues from being used politically.

That explanation might sound convincing when repeated to a worker who has never seen the financial reports.

It becomes considerably less convincing when the paperwork is sitting right in front of you.

And this is exactly what we see again and again at the Freedom Foundation.

The lie gets told at the top.

It gets handed down.

Then it gets repeated by someone underneath them.

Then repeated again.

And again.

And again.

Until eventually the rank-and-file member at the bottom receives some deformed, misshapen version of reality custom-built to keep the entire machine running.

The union overlords tell the people beneath them what to believe.

Those people repeat it to the next level.

Stewards repeat it to members.

Organizers repeat it to workers.

And somewhere along the way, the truth becomes buried underneath a mountain of talking points designed to protect the institution collecting the money.

The tragedy is that many of the people repeating these claims may actually believe them.

That is how effective the machine has become.

Feed people the same story long enough and eventually they stop asking questions.

Your dues aren’t political.

We fight for you.

We protect you.

We get you better wages.

We get you better benefits.

You need us.

Without us, you’re helpless.

Drink the Kool-Aid.

Trust us.

Tomorrow will be better.

And meanwhile, the people pouring the Kool-Aid are the ones sitting at the banquet table.

This deception does not stop with political spending.

It infects nearly every promise modern unions make about what they supposedly exist to accomplish.

They say they fight to protect good employees.

Yet we repeatedly see union rules and contracts used to protect poorly performing employees, making accountability unnecessarily difficult while productive workers are forced to share the same umbrella with people they may believe are dragging everyone else down.

They say they fight tirelessly for higher wages.

Yet worker after worker tells us they see precious little evidence of that relentless fight compared with the hundreds or thousands of dollars disappearing from their paychecks every year.

They say they fight for better benefits.

And yet one look at the compensation enjoyed by some union executives raises an obvious question:

Exactly whose benefits are we talking about?

Some of these executives make five or six times what the average dues-paying member earns.

Think about that.

The rank-and-file employee is worried about groceries.

Gas.

Rent.

Mortgage payments.

Childcare.

Electric bills.

Whether there is enough money left before the next paycheck.

Meanwhile, the union executive class lives fat off the backs of the very workers they claim to serve.

I thought the union was supposed to work for the member.

But increasingly, when you follow the money, it looks like the member works for the union.

The rank and file provide the cash.

The rank and file provide the political muscle.

The rank and file provide the legitimacy.

The rank and file provide the army.

And the executive overlords sit comfortably above it all, directing the ship toward their preferred political and institutional destination while the wage-slave passengers below deck are expected to keep shoveling coal into the furnace.

They are told paradise is just over the horizon.

Just keep working.

Just keep paying.

Just keep trusting.

Just keep sacrificing.

The waters grow more treacherous.

The passengers grow more desperate.

But somehow the people in the captain’s quarters never seem to miss a meal.

And when someone finally asks where the ship is actually going, the answer is always the same:

Trust us.

They tell workers to starve themselves today so they can feast tomorrow.

But tomorrow never seems to come for the people doing the starving.

The feast is happening right now.

It is simply happening upstairs.

That is the illusion.

That is the grift.

And that is why the constant stream of misinformation is so important to maintaining the system.

Because if the worker at the bottom actually understood where the money went…

If that worker actually read the LM-2…

If that worker actually understood his or her constitutional rights…

If that worker actually knew union financial support could be voluntary…

If that worker started questioning whether the hundreds or thousands of dollars disappearing every year were producing anything remotely comparable in value…

The entire relationship changes.

Suddenly the union has to justify itself.

Suddenly the member is no longer begging the union for answers.

The union has to answer to the member.

And that is precisely the relationship the modern union machine appears terrified of creating.

Instead, workers are fed a carefully manufactured mythology.

Without us, who will fight for what you deserve?

But then regulations, contracts and union practices can protect systems that tell productive workers their individual merit matters less than maintaining the collective machine.

Without us, who will protect you from injustice?

Yet unions themselves participate in creating political and institutional systems their members may vehemently oppose — and then those same workers are expected to provide the financial fuel.

Without us, you will have no voice.

Yet how much of a voice does a worker really have when questioning the union narrative immediately makes that worker the enemy?

They claim to break chains while forging new ones.

Then they hand the worker the bill for the metal.

They claim to protect people from exploitation while constructing a system in which the people at the bottom finance the comfort, power and political ambitions of the people sitting at the top.

They tell workers the union is their shield.

But what happens when the shield becomes another master?

What happens when the organization supposedly created to protect workers becomes so powerful, so wealthy and so institutionally entrenched that protecting itself becomes more important than serving them?

That is the sickness at the heart of this entire system.

It is a pack of lies so thoroughly disseminated that people throughout the structure can repeat them sincerely.

The lie becomes doctrine.

The doctrine becomes culture.

The culture becomes unquestionable.

And eventually workers are conditioned to believe that continuing to drink the very Kool-Aid draining their wallets is somehow necessary for their survival.

That is why our presence at places like the Clark County Government Center matters.

We are disrupting that cycle.

We are putting the financial reports on the table.

We are asking the questions union leadership would rather workers never ask.

We are telling rank-and-file employees that they have rights.

We are reminding them that the money in their paycheck belonged to them before anyone else decided they were entitled to a piece of it.

And we are giving workers something the union machine has every reason to fear:

A choice.

Because once someone realizes the chains around his wrists were never required to be there in the first place, convincing him to keep wearing them becomes a hell of a lot harder.