This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Saturday, November 23rd, 2019.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The Janus ruling at the US Supreme Court established that government workers who are not

members of unions no longer have to pay union dues or fees.

So where do things stand now for workers who would like to declare their independence.

Joe Lehman is president of the Mackinaw Center.

We spoke last month in Colorado Springs.

Sure, the ruling was almost a year and a half ago.

And what it did was it gave about 5 million government workers the

ability to be treated as if they were unionized in a right to work state where they can't be compelled to support a union.

Just like you said, where it stands now is you've got these 5 million or more workers who now have rights that are recognized by the court, but most of them

don't know they have these rights and most of them don't know how to exercise

them and that's where the Mackinaw Center and other groups come in.

You said 5 million people. These are people who are most likely not interested in being a union or these

are people who are paying fees who are not members of the unions and may or may not care about offering that support.

These are unionized government employees and frankly we don't know how many of them are interested in being in a union but most of them

were told when they got their job working for a state or local municipal or

school government whatever that they had to support the union or they couldn't have the job.

This Janus didn't really have much effect on federal employees.

Okay, so what are some of the remaining, I guess, vestigial parts of this union power that just simply shouldn't exist.

Well, for the main thing is that the unions

collect an enormous amount of money through the dues and fees that they levy on workers.

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