DETROIT (AP) Thousands of Michigan state employees cant be forced to pay labor unions for negotiating contracts and providing other services, the state Supreme Court said Wednesday.
Advertisement
“The unions told the state Supreme Court that right-to-work doesn’t apply to public employees”.
The 4-3 ruling will affect about 36,000 state employees.
In general, right-to-work laws prohibit requiring unions from collecting fees from non-union employees, which opponents say drains unions of money and weakens their ability to bargain for good wages and benefits.
However, in a majority opinion, Chief Justice Robert P. Young wrote that the legislature does have that power.
The 6-1 ruling reversed a 2013 appeals court decision that declared the law unconstitutional.
Justices Stephen Markman, Brian Zahra and David Viviano joined Young in the majority. The COA, in a split decision, had ruled that the Legislature has the authority to pass laws on such public policy matters.
Justices said the measure, signed in 2011 by Republican Gov. Rick Snyder, does not infringe on the Civil Service Commissions powers in part because voters did not consider pensions or other fringe benefits to be compensation when they ratified the state constitution in 1963.
They resolved this case on the basis of issues that were outside the issues that were actually briefed and argued, said Kelly, who was joined by justices Richard Bernstein and Bridget McCormack.
In the dissent, Justice Mary Beth Kelly pointed out that the commission doesn’t collect the fees; the union does, meaning the fees constitute a regulation of an employment activity and are not a “quasi-tax”.
Advertisement
“The majority’s conclusion upsets this traditional understanding of the scope of the commission’s constitutional authority to regulate the conditions of employment for employees in the classified state civil service”, she wrote.
