States: Illinois entrepreneur turned governor Bruce Rauner ends the practice of forced union dues for government workers who don't want to join a union as he pursues right-to-work zones to promote growth.
In Illinois, they're called "fair share" dues collected from workers said to benefit from the collective bargaining of the unions they're in thrall to, whether they want to join or not, moneys collected by force to pay for that representation."Fair share" is a favorite mantra to liberals, but not to newly elected Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner. He believes that there's nothing fair about extorting money from people for having a job — in this case, a public-sector job with the money used to lobby the same government that pays their salaries.
Rauner, a Republican, took on the public-sector unions early on in his campaign to make a dark-blue state turn red.
"The government-union bosses are at the core of our spending problem in Illinois," he said in a primary debate, arguing that public unions create a "conflict of interest for the taxpayers" and have made a mess of the state's finances.
Public union pensions, a payback for union support in elections, were bankrupting the state.
To break this incestuous relationship between government unions and the government, Rauner issued an executive order on Monday saying that workers in government unions didn't have to pay their "fair share" anymore.
As an added precaution, he filed a pre-emptive lawsuit in Chicago to have his action certified as legal. The Democrat-controlled state legislature could vote to override the order, of course, but the gauntlet has been thrown down.



















