Every electoral season brings forth new lessons in how money and deceit can be used to corrupt the California initiative process.
But it will be hard for future players to top the promoters of a new initiative that is designed to sap the political strength of the state's public employee unions, yet comes disguised as an "employee empowerment" measure.
This initiative would require all public employee unions to obtain annual written permission from their members before contributing money to political candidates or groups. The promoters hope to exploit human inertia to hobble the unions in one of their most important functions, which is to support candidates who promote workers' interests over industrialists': If union members have to affirmatively approve such expenditures every year, the backers assume, a sizable percentage won't bother.
The perpetrators, who hide behind the wolf-in-sheep's-clothing moniker of the Coalition for Employee Rights but are actually financed by big business, began submitting petition signatures this week.
Their hope is to qualify the proposal for the next state ballot, either a special election in November or the regular vote in June 2006.
If a more cynical and dishonest ballot proposal has come down the pike in recent years, I can't imagine what it might be. The measure resembles Proposition 226, which was soundly defeated in 1998, a time when such "paycheck protection" measures enjoyed a nationwide vogue. But that initiative applied to all unions in the state; this one is aimed only at public employee unions.
The campaign's spearhead is Lewis K. Uhler, a Sacramento-area land developer with impeccable credentials as a right-wing anti-tax crusader. He says he's motivated by a sincere concern that thousands of California government workers are being extorted by their unions, via dues and fees, to pay for political campaigns with which they disagree.
When we spoke this week, Uhler called this situation "a violation of fundamental civil rights on the part of the employees who may or may not like candidates or ballot positions supported by the unions." He repeated a chestnut attributed to Thomas Jefferson, that "to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves is sinful and tyrannical," and portrayed his initiative as a tool to free "indentured servants" (i.e., the union members). "We're trying to re-empower the employee in a meaningful way," he said.
