This opinion editorial originally appeared in the Bend Bulletin on November 26, 2018.
Quit cable and the cable company doesn’t force you to keep paying for months on end. Quit a job and your employer can’t force you to keep working. Quit college and the school can’t force you to pay for classes you won’t attend.
But just try to quit a public employee union in Oregon, and the union can keep making the employee pay for membership — sometimes for months on end.
Fair treatment for workers should be more than a slogan for Oregon’s public employee unions. When workers want to quit two of the state’s largest public employee unions — AFSCME Local 75 and the Service Employees International Union 503 — the unions shouldn’t have schemes to compel them to pay, anyway.
The Freedom Foundation and the National Right to Work Foundation have filed suit against the two unions in federal court.
