In the words of the teachers who brought the case, “paying fees to a union should not be a prerequisite for teaching in a public school”. A ruling is expected this summer.
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Michele Jawando-the vice president of legal progress at the liberal Center for American Progress-took to these editorial pages recently to sing the praises of unions and question the merits of Ms. Friedrichs’ case. But she is required to pay fees to the union because she is covered under the teachers contract negotiated by the union. And yet both pay and job protections are key aspects of collective bargaining.
However, plaintiffs in the current case claim that collective bargaining by a public employees’ union is political speech, as employment contracts affect educational policy and government spending.
In the 2014 Harris v. Quinn decision, the high court ruled by a 5-4 margin that the First Amendment prohibits the collection of an agency fee – also known as “fair share” – from home health care providers who do not wish to join or support a union.
The court could choose to ban the opt-out process and require that workers opt into paying the full dues, he said.
Opponents of Right to Work efforts, including the “Workplace Freedom” bills in OH, have long maintained that the laws weaken workers’ rights and will lead to lower salaries, decreased benefits and inferior working conditions. Here, teachers are allowed to resign from the union only at a specific time of the year, and (shockingly) that time is not conspicuously advertised. “The defined benefit program and the expense to my community and my nation, and using my money to protect teachers who are ineffective and sometimes abusive in class – this is a liberty issue for me”. But Ms. Friedrichs sued because she doesn’t want to contribute to the union. In the National Right to Work Foundation poll, 36 percent of government union members said that they planned to vote Republican in upcoming elections. The question posed by Petrilli and other skeptics from the right is whether it is ever possible for a public employee union to separate that partisanship from nonpolitical activity. Teachers don’t have to formally belong to their union. The CTU announced early in the negotiations that its demands included a freeze on charter school expansion, a reduction in standardized testing and a shift of tax increment financing money to education.
Trust me: Without a union, we teachers might not even get paid a living wage. When she was a 22-year-old college student, she worked with a teacher who was abusive to students, yelling at them and yanking them around.
Horrified, Friedrichs asked her teacher-trainer why the teacher had not been disciplined or fired.
Teachers pay an especially steep price to their unions. To help compensate for the loss, Anliker said he took an additional 10-hour-a-week job. “You can’t redo first grade”.
“So, this is the Koch brothers, who have made it really clear that their goal is to undermine unions, to go after worker rights, and to privatize and profit from the public good”, she said.
That’s why it’s eminently possible to be broadly in favor of expanding union power, and against expanding that power in the government sphere.
This case is being watched intently in IL and the rest of the country. In addition, the plaintiffs contend that nearly every subject of collective bargaining is inherently a political issue in the public sector.
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The attorneys in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association assert that agency fees “require that employees and teachers who disagree with [union] positions must nevertheless subsidize the union”, as Justice Anthony M. Kennedy put it [“Justices seem leery of labor’s forced dues”, front page, January 12]. You can not bargain with the government without doing politics, they argue, and forcing an employee to pay for that bargaining is coerced speech, and therefore unconstitutional. Because this union under California law is a state entity.
