The United States Supreme Court this week ruled that unions don’t have the right to collect dues from employees who decline membership in the union. The 5-4 decision overturns a 41-year-old precedent that forced employers to deduct the dues from their payrolls.

Closer examination might make it easier to understand how the Janus vs. AFSCME is such a watershed defeat for organized labor, particularly in Western Pennsylvania.

The decision strikes down laws here and in 21 other states that authorize unions to negotiate contracts requiring all employees to pay a “fair share” fee to cover the cost of collective bargaining.

The practice dates back to when public sector unions for state and municipal government workers were getting established. The Supreme Court ruled in 1977 that these employees, including school teachers and police officers, would not be required to pay full union dues if some of the money went for political contributions. But the justices upheld the fair share fees on the supposition that all of the employees benefit from a union contract and its grievance procedures.

From a practical standpoint, the arrangement might have been sustainable under a 1977-era demographic. But times and circumstances have changed dramatically since then. Medical advances have increased the life spans and retirement years of baby boomers, as birth rates declined — both conditions straining the taxpayer to feed pension funds with obligations climbing into the tens of billions of dollars.

The size of these pensions — and the payments needed to keep them solvent — have approached insurmountable levels in recent years. Meanwhile, political contributions from labor have not done much to encourage or catalyze remedies. Beneath the political inertia rests a false impression that labor firmly represents every dues-paying employee — even those whose dues have been confiscated involuntarily since 1977.

The continued inertia — and growing dissatisfaction with it — might explain why a state like Pennsylvania, with a Democratic edge in voter registrations, has a Republican House and Senate, and narrowly elected Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election.

It was a more conservative Supreme Court — a court more in tune with these dissatisfied employees — that overturned 41 years of fair-share fees with this week’s decision. And it will be a more sympathetic court that is likely to uphold future moves like conversion of pension funds to employee-funded 401(K) plans that have been common currency for years across the private sector.

To be clear, the rights of organized labor are to be upheld and respected. But labor is no more entitled to political power than any other entity.

It was none other than the father of community organizing, Saul A. Alinskly, who defined political power this way in his watershed 1971 work, “Rules for Radicals:” Power is organized people and organized money. A labor union might have plenty of people and plenty of money. But if not property organized, they do not constitute power.

The Supreme Court ruling serves as a reminder that, in political power circles, It’s the organizational details that most often are overlooked or taken for granted.