The Missing Corporation
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
It’s fascinating to read the lingo the Left is using in respect of the big union dues case heard in the Supreme Court yesterday. There was a marvelous glimpse of it in the New York Times, which greeted the hearing with a headline on its homepage that read: “Striking a Blow for the Big Guy.” Below it was this warning: “If the Supreme Court rules against unions in Janus v. Afscme, it will be devastating for working people and a victory for corporations.”
The piece the Times headlines is by a union boss. Fair enough. But what corporations? The original appeal to the Supreme Court, known as the petition for a writ of certiorari, lists none. It includes a list of parties to the case. One is the petitioner, Mark Janus, an Illinois state employee who, his petition says, is being “forced” — and “against his will” — to pay “agency fees” to a union, the Association of Federal, State, County and Municipal Employees.
Whatever else one can say about the heroic Mr. Janus, he is not a corporation. He’s a working stiff. The petitioner, remember, is the side the New York Times wants to lose the case. Could it be that in this sprawling litigation there lurks another petitioner who is a corporation? It turns out that there’s not. According to the petition to the Supreme Court, no corporate disclosure statement is required because “no petitioner is a corporation.”
So not only is the petitioner not a corporation but it turns out that the petitioner is the only party that could pass as one of the “working people” (itself a Marxist phrasing; management works, too, after all). Which leads us to the other side of the case. Could it be by some inversion that there is a corporation lurking on the other side, opposing this hapless working person named Mark Janus? Well, yes, in a manner of speaking.
The opposing side, the side the Left wants to get the victory in this case, does have a “corporation,” broadly defined. That would be the AFSCME local. In other words, what passes for the corporation here is the labor union, which wants to be able extract from the hapless state employee, Mr. Janus, a union “agency fee” that Mr. Janus, and no doubt thousands like him, don’t want to pay. In other words, a victory for Mr. Janus would be striking a blow not for corporations but for the little guy.
