By Stuart A. Bussey, MD, JD, UAPD President
Fellow UAPD members, staff, and honored guests,
I will start this State of the Union address with a well-known quote from Ruth Stafford Peale… “Find a Need …and Fill It.” These words describe the essence of a successful business model. Whether a service or product, the customer’s needs must be satisfied in order for an organization to survive, to thrive. In the case of our nonprofit corporate entity, the Union of American Physicians and Dentists, the customers are you, the members. You pay dues, you support our staff and each other, and you give good care to your patients. Our job is to take care of you. Among the services that our union has provided to our members for nearly half a century have been to bargain contracts, to enforce their provisions by grievance and arbitration, to represent them in disciplinary actions, and to fight for a safe workplace.
Since 1977 public unions, including ours, were assured of a 100% “customer base” by virtue of the US Supreme Court decision Abood v. The City of Detroit. That court decided that members of bargaining units who didn’t want to be part of a union for whatever reason still had to pay their ”fair share” for the contracts and services their union provided them. But times have changed. Our country has changed. With the rise of an oligarchy, increasing corporate influence, technology, and global outsourcing, unions have lost their influence. In the 1950s 36% of workers belonged to unions. Now only 11% do.
Those who never fully embraced the philosophy of union membership seized upon this summer’s Janus Supreme Court decision to drop out of their unions, to become non-members. Across the country, public unions now face a reckoning. While some unions lost only a few members, others lost almost half of their membership. Despite our best efforts to convince them to remain or become full members, UAPD lost a fifth of its membership. Almost all of that loss was from the fair share sector. Only a handful of our loyal full members have dropped out. That is good news. But make no mistake. The fair share member loss has significantly decreased financial resources with which to serve our members.
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