Six Pennsylvania Republicans Side with Union Bosses over Taxpayers

10/17/2014

Union dues, fees and political contributions are deducted automatically from government employees’ paychecks and wired directly to unions at taxpayers’ expense. No other political organizations have this privilege.

On October 15, Senator Scott Wagner offered an amendment to HB 803 to end this practice. The amendment would have prohibited the government for acting as a collection agent to union dues, fees and political contributions. In effect, all this amendment would have done is required union members to write a monthly check or make other arrangements to have the money deducted from their bank accounts.

Despite overwhelming public support for this kind of reform, six Republicans joined with every Democrat to protect the flow of money to government union bosses. According to Kate Giammarise from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette those Republicans are:

Sen. Pat Browne
Sen. Eric Erickson
Sen. Stewart Greenleaf
Sen. Bob Mensch
Sen. John Rafferty
Sen. Tommy Tomlinson

(Senators McIlhinney and Washington were on personal leave and did not vote.)

We will update this post as soon as the official role call becomes available.

If you see your Senator’s name listed above or are represented by a Democrat, please contact them immediately and ask them why unions should have this unfair political advantage.

If you have a Republican Senator, who voted with taxpayers on this issue give him or her a call and thank them.

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