As for what the atypical swing justice thought of the case, Williams summarized what Justice Anthony Kennedy had to say: “Justice Anthony Kennedy said many teachers strongly disagree with the union’s position on tenure, merit pay and classroom size but are forced to subsidize it any way”.
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About 90 percent of teachers and staff in New Haven are members of the union, and about 10 percent are not, he said. But he was consistently hostile Monday.
The government of California and the CTA have argued the Abood-challenging nonmembers have not indicated any specific collective-bargaining actions attributed to the CTA that they considered as “political”.
The Supreme Court’s conservative majority appears ready to strike down mandatory fees collected by the California Teacher’s Association.
In this first day of oral arguments for Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, it’s not looking good for the unions. “That’s pretty far removed from the heart of the First Amendment”.
Unions point out that requiring non-union members to pay fees helps to combat the “free-rider” problem of giving workers the benefits of the union without having to pay for them.
In almost half the states in the country, unions can collect those fees even from nonmembers who disagree with the government shelling out more money on public employees.
This is an important case to watch, because public employee jobs used to represent the pathway for African-American workers to enter the middle-class.
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.
Last week, lead plaintiff Rebecca Friedrichs and Terry Pell, president of the Center for Individual Rights, outlined their side of the case with reporter, insisting that forcing employees to pay dues to a union infringed on their rights to free speech.
A legal brief filed at the Supreme Court by the conservative Buckeye Institute in Columbus described the agency fees as garnered by “state coercion” and argued that unions in so-called “right-to-work” states are more conservative in their spending on overhead costs.
Recent decisions of the court headed by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. suggest there may be an appetite among some justices to overturn the system, but Abood has been reaffirmed numerous times, and its principles are entrenched in labor relations.
Agency fees do not fund unions’ political activities, but rather strictly the costs of union grievance-handling, organizing, and collective bargaining. Studies from other states show that eliminating fair share fees will reduce public employee membership rates and wages.
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“This is a case in which there are tens of thousands of contracts with these provisions”, she said. Non-members don’t pay the same fees as members. “They prevent the unfairness and conflict that could arise were only part of the work force to support representation activities that, by law, must advance and protect the interests of every employee”. “In this era of broken municipal budgets and a national crisis in public education, it is hard to imagine more politically charged issues than how much money cash-strapped local governments should devote to public employees, or what policies public schools should adopt to best educate children”.
