The AFL-CIO’s decision, made at a general board meeting in Manhattan this week, to raise its tax on affiliated unions by four cents a month for each member, reported yesterday by William F. Hammond Jr. on page one of The New York Sun, is expected to generate about $6.2 million this year, with much of that money expected to be funneled into political campaigns. Presumably this lucre will be enlisted on the side of Democrats. This puts us in a mind to recollect the Supreme Court’s 1988 decision in Communications Workers of America v. Beck, in which the court determined that unions had no right to use agency fees — the dues non-union members must pay to work in a union shop — for purposes not directly related to collective bargaining. Currently just under half the states have so-called right to work laws, which ban closed union shops, so that no one is ever compelled to join or pay money to a union to get a job.

In the states without right to work laws, including New York, workers uncomfortable with their dues going to political causes are forced to lose the right to vote for union officers and otherwise influence shop policies. Unions have interpreted Beck as narrowly as possible to make it an arduous process for members uncomfortable with their unions’ politics to leave. Ignoring the obvious social pressures of leaving the union, stories about unions that only allow members to leave during a small window of time each year abound. Members are discouraged by long, bureaucratic processes. The National Labor Relations Board, which should be enforcing Beck, has failed to do so for 14 years, under both Republican and Democratic presidents afraid to take on organized labor.

President Bush earlier this month filled two slots on the board, including the chairman’s slot, with Republicans. Surprisingly, this did not trigger a great tumult in labor ranks, though the unions have consistently protested any proposal that would limit labor’s ability to extract forcibly campaign funds from their members. In February 2001, Mr. Bush signed Executive Order 13201, requiring federal contractors to post a standard workplace notice informing employees of their rights under Beck. The United Automobile Workers, along with the UAW-Labor Employment and Training Corporation and two affiliates of the Office and Professional Employees International Union, quickly filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The less the workers know, it seems, the better.

The likely result of the AFL-CIO’s decision this week is an eventual rise in members’ dues, as local unions are forced to send more of their money to the umbrella organization, leaving them with less funds dedicated to their immediate and local needs. The move is also conspicuously tied to the upcoming election cycle. We have no opposition to the involvement of unions, businesses, or anyone else in politics. Nor with the notion of any of them spending money on politics. It is hard to imagine the Founders of America countenancing restrictions of the kind on the law books today. But the silence of the reformers on the failure to enforce Beck is deafening. All the more so in light of the preparations the AFL-CIO is making to spend in the upcoming campaign.