What Happens If We Lose Dues Check-Off? Check-Off by Other Means

From Labor notes:

As public workers from Wisconsin to Idaho face legislative efforts to eliminate dues check-off rights, how we fund and sustain our organizations has become a central question. Here in the right to work South, where public employees have never had the right to bargain collectively, we struggle with self-sustainability every day. Here’s the good news: while having dues check-off helps, not having it isn’t fatal.

As public workers from Wisconsin to Idaho face legislative efforts to eliminate dues check-off rights, how we fund and sustain our organizations has become a central question.

Here in the right to work South, where public employees have never had the right to bargain collectively, we struggle with self-sustainability every day. Here’s the good news: while having dues check-off helps, not having it isn’t fatal.

I am an organizer and former president of Communications Workers Local 3865 in Tennessee. We organize public higher education workers. In the last decade we’ve built a non-majority union that’s grown from two dozen members on one campus to more than 1,200 in eight cities.

In the 1930s, as modern unionism was taking off, dues check off did not exist. Unions tried many things. Giving lapel buttons to workers who paid their dues proved popular for industrial unions, auto workers and electrical workers among them. That method isn’t going to cut it these days.

In the early years of our union, elements of our leadership argued that having to hand-collect dues kept the local’s leaders and organizers honest.

This attitude meant attending weekly meetings to make plans to collect dues. Quickly we realized that spending the majority of our time playing bill collector was not part and parcel of union democracy, nor did it help build the kind of political relationships we’re aiming for on the job.

Stewards need to spend their time listening to co-workers, gathering opinions about how to build the union, organizing meetings, and working to save jobs from budget cuts.

One method we landed on for dues collection is the bank draft, where the union deducts dues straight from members’ accounts. Ideally, this means that when new recruits fill out a membership form they also write down their bank routing number and account number. This is our “dues agreement.”

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