THURSDAY, JUL 12, 2018, 9:48
AM
BY LISA GRAVES
With last month’s
monumental Janus decision by the Supreme Court, the Koch family won a
major victory in their multi-generational attack on unions.
The ruling spreads to the
entire public sector one of the laws the Koch fortune first helped push through
in Kansas 60 years ago: “right-to-work.” And in doing so it enshrines the
union-busting agenda their fossil fuel money has helped advance for
decades.
Through a single vote, the
Court’s 5-4 Janus decision reverses decades of legal precedent that
had obstructed part of the Koch’s pro-corporate agenda. That vote was secured
with the Kochs’ help in bankrolling efforts that include: helping to maintain a
GOP Senate majority; helping the Senate block President Obama from filling the
February 2016 Supreme Court vacancy; and helping to win the confirmation of
right-wing corporate activist Neil Gorsuch.
Janus helps cement the
nation’s highest court as the Koch Court, and Charles Koch wants to keep it
that way.
As Documented first
detailed in partnership with the Intercept, for months the Kochs
had been investing heavily in anticipation of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s
retirement from the Court, which was announced on June 27, the same day
as Janus. Earlier this year, the Koch group “Americans for Prosperity”
(AFP) hired Sarah Field from the Koch-funded Federalist Society to spearhead
its campaign to extend the Koch hold on the Court for perhaps a generation or
more.
Despite claims by AFP that
helping to seat Gorsuch was their “first” foray into Supreme Court nominations,
the Koch effort to influence who becomes a judge and how they interpret the law
goes back much further.
In fact, the Kochs have been
investing in reshaping the law to suit their personal agenda for decades. For
example, the Koch group Citizens for a Sound Economy, AFP’s predecessor, backed Clarence
Thomas’ controversial confirmation to the Court more than 25 years ago.
The Kochs’ long-term agenda to
remake the United States in their image is a multi-pronged effort that includes
changing both the law and who makes or interprets the laws, including the
anti-union Janus decision.
The seeds of Janus
The effort to roll back union
rights actually began almost a century ago, as wealthy industrialists objected
to the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, known as the Wagner Act, which
enshrined the right to collective bargaining in the United States.
Many tycoons of the time, like
Alfred Sloan, head of General Motors, opposed those rights along with other
business reforms of FDR’s New Deal.
Fred Koch, co-founder of the
corporation that later became Koch Industries, harshly
criticized American workers under New Deal policies in 1938. He
extolled the economic policies of Emperor Hirohito and fascists Adolf Hitler
and Benito Mussolini:
Although nobody agrees with
me, I am of the opinion that the only sound countries in the world are Germany,
Italy, and Japan, simply because they are all working and working hard… The
laboring people in those countries are proportionately much better off than
they are any place else in the world. When you contrast the state of mind of
Germany today with what it was in 1925 you begin to think that perhaps this
course of idleness, feeding at the public trough, dependence on government,
etc., with which we are afflicted is not permanent and can be overcome.
Only recently, through the
investigative work of Jane Mayer, has the public learned that the
Koch fortune was actually built in part on directly aiding Hitler by
building the oil-cracking factory that became “a key component in the Nazi war
machine.” As Mayer noted in her 2016 book Dark Money: The Hidden
History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, that
factory refined
high-octane fuel needed for the Luftwaffe, which targeted, terrorized, and
killed many thousands of innocent civilians. Fred Koch’s praise of Germany
came after Hitler’s
air bombers helped murder 136 men, women, and children in Guernica in
the Basque region, a tragedy made famous by the mural painted by Pablo Picasso.
Meanwhile, industrialists like
Sloan pursued efforts to undo New Deal reforms. In 1947, Congress amended the
Wagner Act with the Taft-Hartley Act. It gave states the power to pass
“right-to-work” laws that undermined collective bargaining by not requiring workers
who benefit from bargained rights to pay dues to the unions that secured and
enforced them.
How the Kochs fertilized
“right-to-work”
As Mayer noted:
[Fred Koch] was an early and
active member of the Wichita-based DeMille Foundation for Political Freedom, an
anti-labor group [founded in 1945] that was a forerunner of the National Right
to Work Defense Foundation. In a revealing private letter, one of its staff
members explained the group's ‘Astroturf’ strategy. In reality, he said,
big-business industrialists would run the group, serving as its ‘anonymous
quarterbacks,’ and ‘call the turns.’ But he said they needed to sell the ‘yarn’
that the group was ‘composed of housewives, farmers, small businessmen,
professional people, wage earners-not big business industrialists.’ Otherwise,
he admitted, the movement was ‘almost certainly doomed to failure.’
By 1954, an engineer from
Wichita, Kan., Reed Larson, took a leave from his job at the Coleman Company,
to launch Kansans-for-the-Right-to-Work.
The following year, former Rep. Fred Hartley, Jr., (R-N.J.) co-founded the
National Right to Work Committee (NRTWC). By 1958, the NRTWC was targeting six
states to adopt right-to-work laws but it failed in every place, except Kansas.
“Fred [Koch] co-led a
referendum drive to alter the state constitution in order to make it harder for
unions to take root in Kansas,” Duke University Professor Nancy
MacLean noted.
On Nov. 9, 1958, the New
York Times reported that right-to-work won in Kansas because anti-union
views had taken hold, noting:
More campaign efforts and more
money were expended on the emotion-provoking issue than on the campaigns of all
Republican and Democratic state and Congressional candidates combined. ... For
the last 10 days or so before Election Day an organization called Kansans-for-the-Right-to-Work
flooded newspapers, television channels and other advertising media with
appeals to ‘vote yes.’ These by far outnumbered the ‘vote no’ advertisements of
unions opposing the amending.
A month later, Fred Koch
joined Robert Welch and ten other men in Indianapolis to found the extreme
rightwing group dubbed the “John Birch Society” (JBS).
As the Washington Post noted
in its 1961 profile of JBS:
At the top of the Society’s
structure in Wichita are several very wealthy industrialists. Oil engineer Fred
Koch is president of the Rock Island Oil and Refining Co. A millionaire several
times over, he is on the Society’s national council. … Wichita is the John
Birch Society’s center of strength in Kansas, and one of its greatest in the country.
... The leadership of the Birch Society overlaps heavily with the leadership of
the organizations that successfully campaigned in 1958 for a right to work
amendment to the State’s Constitution.
As detailed by Group Research
Inc. in its 1962 history of JBS,
Koch worked with both NRTWC and the Christian Crusade in arguing against union
dues like those at issue in the Janus case.
A history of hostility
In 1959, Fred Koch joined the
Executive Committee to plan the JBS strategy to push back against what it
viewed as communism in nearly every American institution.
In 1960, Koch published
his polemic
“A Business Man Looks at Communism” and distributed it to JBS chapters
across the country. That pamphlet makes a variety of hysterical claims against
unions, including:
Labor Unions have long been a
Communist goal. How far they have been penetrated by Communists I have no idea,
but it must be very far indeed, judging the hatred and venom poured out in some
labor papers….
Koch also accused the U.S.
Supreme Court under former Gov. Earl Warren (R-CA) of issuing pro-Communist
decisions, the universities of having thousands of Communist professors, the
United Nations of being subversive, and former GOP President Dwight Eisenhower
of being soft on Communism.
Similar sentiments were
expressed in numerous other publications the JBS also pushed. The organization
pitched a screed against the union
workers who organized against Kohler fixtures in Wisconsin. It pushed
attacks on the UAW’s Walter
Reuther, who was posthumously awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom.
It published and peddled
right-wing writer Rosalie Gordon’s attack
on the U.S. Supreme Court for decisions enforcing collective
bargaining rights as protecting the “labor-union monopoly,” along with what she
called the “plague” of desegregation caused by Brown v. Board of Education.
The JBS also pushed reprints
of tomes by Ludwig von Mises attacking unions as illegitimate
intervenors in the “free market,” artificial
inflators of wages for workers, and thieves
of the profits of tycoons. It promoted F.A. Hayek’s vilification of
government regulation of corporations as leading to fascism and Hilaire du
Berrier’s conspiracy
theories that American labor unions were supposedly using union dues
to finance communist terrorist violence abroad.
Fred Koch’s son Charles urged visitors to the John
Birch Society bookstore in Wichita to read copies of JBS pamphlets, including
those by anti-labor writers from the Austrian School of Economics, like Mises.
Indeed, as the present
author first
documented for the Center for Media and Democracy, Charles Koch became
active in JBS after returning home to Wichita to help with the family business.
Charles was a leader and fundraiser for JBS, including underwriting its
publications and national radio network, while it attacked collective
bargaining and leaders of the civil rights movement such as the Reverend Martin
Luther King, Jr., and Rosa Parks.
Charles Koch in action
Though he left JBS in 1968,
Charles Koch never abandoned its core anti-union agenda and the lessons of
his father’s commitment to right-to-work. He did try to shed some of the
rhetoric around communist conspiracies, though of late he was painted by Koch
political strategist Richard Fink as a martyr
against “collectivism,” in audio obtained by the Undercurrent, which also
included outlandish claims linking fascism and the minimum wage.
It was Charles Koch’s
investment in lifting up the work of Mises and Hayek, who made similar claims,
that helped preserve and extend their legacy. As Stephen Moore noted in a
2006 profile
on Charles for the Wall Street Journal:
The authors who have had the
most profound influence on his own political philosophy include F.A. Hayek, Ludwig von
Mises, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Simon, Paul Johnson and Charles Murray. Mr.
Koch says that he experienced an intellectual epiphany in the early 1960s, when
he attended a conference on free-market capitalism hosted by the late, great
Leonard Reed.
Charles brought Mises to
Wichita to speak and deployed
F.A. “Baldy” Harper’s Institute for Humane Studies (IHS) to promote
Mises and his protégé Hayek. As lauded by Reed’s Foundation for Economic
Education (FEE), Hayek argued
that unions violated the very idea of the “rule of law” and that the
Wagner Act was central to that violation, a sentiment he promoted in numerous
writings.
Charles Koch is deeply devoted
to an alternative universe in which collective bargaining undermines the rule
of law and is not a major cause of increased wages. Moore noted in his
interview:
As we continue, Mr. Koch
becomes increasingly animated. He discusses another seminal work in his
collection, F.A. Harper’s 1957 Why Wages Rise.
The book demonstrates ‘that
wages rise not because of unions or government action, but because of marginal
productivity gains -- people get more money when they produce more value for
other people.’ Then he confides, “I was so thrilled by this revelation that I
had what Maslow called a ‘peak experience.’'"
Koch has also supported the
NRTWC, which “sought
to put a new face on the anti-union campaign by building its rhetoric on the
arguments of Hayek, Mises, and otherswith a ‘respectable’ pedigree.” The
NRTWC argues that:
Compulsory unionism itself
violates the dignity of the individual worker, regardless of how the forced
union tribute is spent. As the late Nobel Prize-winning economist Friedrich A. von
Hayek wrote: “[T]he coercion which unions have been permitted to
exercise … is primarily the coercion of fellow workers.
Deep devotion and investment
Hayek and Mises are not the
only two virulently anti-union economists Charles Koch backed. As Nancy MacLean
documented in Democracy in Chains, one of the key architects of the Koch
agenda domestically and internationally, James
Buchanan, also railed against the so-called “union monopolies” for
distorting “free market” wages.
And, as UnKoch My Campus has detailed,
Koch money has funded scores of academics to push their agenda at universities,
buying control over content and personnel with restrictive dictates attached to
their donations.
Many of the rightwing groups
Charles Koch is known to have made a major investment in since the 1970s have
pushed right-to-work or attacked collective bargaining rights. These
include Reason magazine,
the Cato
Institute, Americans
for Prosperity, the American
Legislative Exchange Council, the State
Policy Network and many more.
During David Koch’s 1980 bid
to become vice president, running on the ticket of Libertarian Ed Clark—which
was pushed by Charles and fueled with Koch cash—the campaign platform
included making
right-to-work the law of the land:
[W]e urge repeal of the
National Labor Relations Act, and all state Right to Work Laws, which prohibit
employers from making voluntary contracts with unions. We oppose all government
back-to-work orders as imposing a form of forced labor.
That is, there would be no
need for state right-to-work laws if there were no NLRA that protects
collective bargaining rights. As a result, right-to-work would be effectively
nationalized at the determination of the employer.
After badly losing that
election, the Kochs have invested heavily in changing the culture—and courts of
America—to make their anti-union vision a reality.
Right-to-work is part of that
vision.
Millions spent
A leak of the Kochs’ summer
retreat in 2010 revealed that they featured
NRTWC leaders at their gathering of billionaires to plot plans for
that year’s midterm elections.
In 2012, before most of
America even knew that the Kochs had branded their billionaire conclave as
“Freedom Partners,” that group injected
$1 million directly into the NRTWC among the more than $200 million of
its known spending that cycle.
In 2016, they focused much
of their known political spending on keeping a GOP majority in the Senate, and
they influenced the
make-up of the U.S. Supreme Court by helping to block Judge Merrick Garland’s
confirmation.
For the 2018 election, they’ve
pledged to spend more than $400 million through the Seminar Network, the latest
rebranding of their network of tycoons.
To be clear, the Koch family
fortune is not the only one that has been expended pushing right-to-work laws
to try to weaken the power of ordinary people to negotiate through unions. A
major funder of right-to-work effort has been the Lynde and Harry Bradley
Foundation, along with Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund, which Mother
Jones has dubbed “the ATM” of the right wing.
Collective bargaining has
provided women with greater economic opportunities and job security.
Right-to-work laws also have a disproportionate
impact on people of color, who are union members at a higher rate than
whites. Black
women will likely be the group most adversely affected by the Janus case.
Notably, workers in right-to-work
states also have lower wages than in states that have rejected this
agenda.
Undermining progressives too
The spread of right to work
through Janus also will affect our elections.
As In These Times has
documented with the Center for Media and Democracy, the national push for
right-to-work is designed to undermine the
power of unions and to “defang
and defund” them as a way to weaken the chances for progressives to win in
politics and policy.
The Koch investment in making
right-to-work a national reality represents one of the longest and deepest
commitments to this agenda, aside from NRTWC itself.
And this year marks the 60th
anniversary of Fred Koch’s victory of making right-to-work legally binding in
Kansas.
Now, six decades later,
Charles Koch has helped make his father’s wish binding on the rest of America
through helping to make the Janus ruling a reality.
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