Given the choice, public-sector workers quit their unions

Government employees in Seattle do not exactly fit the profile of the average Republican voter. But As the Washington Examiner's Sean Higgins reported this week, they aren't suckers either.

Thanks to a recent Supreme Court decision on public sector union membership, many members of Local 925 of the Service Employees International Union — those who had not explicitly signed up to join the union — suddenly found that dues were no longer being taken directly out of their paycheck. As a result, 38 percent of the local's membership was gone overnight.

This has happened repeatedly. After Wisconsin forbade unions from siphoning dues directly from government workers' paychecks by default, roughly one-third of the state's unionized public-sector workforce dropped out of a union. In Michigan, more than 10 percent of Michigan teachers who were eligible to quit their union under right-to-work did so in its first two years, despite dogged efforts by the union to make it nearly impossible to quit.

This will happen again, every time and everywhere government workers are given a choice.

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