The case was spearheaded by a conservative group called the Center for Individual Rights which helped a group of California public school teachers bring their case claiming mandatory fees violate the First Amendment rights of workers who disagree with the union’s positions.
Advertisement
The case could undercut organized labor’s influence by allowing public sector workers who are not union members but are forced under state law to pay “agency fees” equivalent to union dues to stop providing this money. While they may not be freed from paying representational dues to a union they don’t support with this case, these workers still have hope. “Really, these unions are not speaking on my behalf”.
Justice Stephen Breyer said overturning Abood would require the court to overrule several related cases in which the high court has approved mandatory payments by lawyers to bar associations and mandatory student fees at public universities. No one is forced to join the union, and no one is required to pay any other fees, such as fees used for political activities.
This year the court may take this principle to its logical conclusion.
“The union is basically making the teachers “compelled-riders” on issues with which they strongly disagree”, Kennedy said.
About 90 percent of teachers and staff in New Haven are members of the union, and about 10 percent are not, he said.
Government workers who are not members of unions have always been able to obtain refunds for the political activities of unions like campaign spending.
“The next question”, Blanning said, “is if people decide not to pay for union representation, should they be represented at all?”
Even when the union’s lawyer, David Frederick, sought to explain routine issues on which the union negotiates such as teacher lunch breaks, he faced hostile questions.
In the opinion of the state, “Collective bargaining does not resemble the wide-ranging, open, and public debate that the First Amendment traditionally protects”, he added. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed.
The court’s liberals defended the current practice and said justices usually think twice before overturning long-standing precedents. Alito said it is now harder to draw the line between collective bargaining and political ends.
Advertisement
“The problem is that everything that is collectively bargained with the government is within the political sphere, nearly by definition”, Justice Antonin Scalia said. “Should the government pay higher wages or lesser wages?” According to the union contract, the teachers to be laid off would not be the ones deemed the least effective, but simply the ones with the least experience. Once a majority of workers vote to be represented by a public sector union, the union must represent all workers, even non-union members. The result would damage labor organizations in the remaining US stronghold, as representatives of more than a third of government employees, compared with less than 7 percent in the private sector. But in Monday’s argument, all the justices sounded as though they had made their decision. And it seems like the Court, in a mode of hyper-activism, is about to mandate just that. But all of them appeared relegated to history during the Friedrichs hearing on Monday, with Scalia sounding every bit as skeptical as his conservative colleagues of the unions’ arguments for collecting fees from nonmembers.
