Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. This is your host, Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal.

One year ago, this month, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in one of the most

consequential cases for government labor relations in U.S. history, Mark Janice of the State

of Illinois versus the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees.

Later that summer, the court ruled that mandatory agency fees from government employees

to unions were unconstitutional under the First Amendment.

Public employee unions are an important source of political support for Democrats, of course,

and in the wake of the Janus decision, blue states are

passing new laws to protect these public unions. To talk about the fallout from the Janus-Janus case

and to explain it, I'll be joined today by Dan DeSalvo. We'll introduce Dan and begin our conversation

after the break. Hello again, everyone. This is Brian Anderson, editor of City Journal. Daniel DeSalvo is a frequent writer for City Journal. He's a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He's an associate professor of political science at City College here in New York, and he's the author of government against itself,

Public Union Power and Its Consequences, which came out from Oxford Press a few years ago.

Dan's latest report for the Manhattan Institute is called Public Sector Unions After Janus,

and he recently had a piece on the topic in the Wall Street Journal. Dan, thanks very much for

joining us. My pleasure. Leading up to the case in question, we were told that the very

existence of public sector unions was going to be at stake. Has it been quite as bad as union

supporters feared? What has been the outcome of the post-Janus environment?

Well, it hasn't certainly been as bad as supporters of public employee unions feared, nor as good,

you could say, as their critics hoped. It's been a much slower process. So two big things

have really happened. The first is that the

court's decision to strike down agency fees for the fees non-members pay to unions as unconstitutional

First Amendment violations meant that unions did lose those monies right out of the gates. And that's

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