The high court was scheduled to hear oral arguments Monday in a California case brought by a group of public school teachers.
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The Supreme Court has long held that requiring non-union members to pay the full amount of union dues would violate their right of free expression, forcing them to subsidize a union’s political activities whether they agree with its goals or not.
At issue are the laws in California and 22 other mostly “blue” states that authorize public employee unions to act as a bargaining agent and to collect “fair-share fees”, also known as agency fees, from all employees.
A Supreme Court case involving California teachers’ unions could have a major impact on public sector unions across the country. The idea behind such dues is that employees who don’t join unions nevertheless benefit from collective bargaining, representation and other union work.
About 90 percent of teachers and staff in New Haven are members of the union, and about 10 percent are not, he said.
Unions that represent relatively highly paid workers such as teachers, cops, firefighters and engineers would probably weather the storm fairly well.
California teachers generally pay around $US1,000 annually in union dues.
At the center of the case is a California public-school teacher named Rebecca Friedrichs. Studies from other states show that eliminating fair share fees will reduce public employee membership rates and wages. The fees, the law says, are meant to pay for collective bargaining activities, including “the cost of lobbying activities”.
In any case, if you can get the benefits of higher salaries and not pay to support the negotiation process, why would you?
That charge – that agency fees violate nonunion workers’ free-speech rights – could undo a almost 40-year-old precedent that said precisely the opposite: that collecting the fees is “constitutionally justified”.
“Everything that’s collectively bargained [in the public sector] is necessarily a political question”, thundered Justice Scalia in describing why a ruling to strike down agency fees would even comport with Abood’s statement that states can’t force workers “to contribute to the support of an ideological cause [they] may oppose as a condition of holding a job”. It was a bad SCOTUS ruling that gave the unions this overreach of power in the first place, and now, the Court has a chance to actually uphold Liberty.
“The union is basically making the teachers “compelled-riders” on issues with which they strongly disagree”, Kennedy said.
A 1977 Supreme Court decision allows “fair share” fees. The court did rule that nonmembers can not be charged a fee to cover for a union’s political activity.
The larger threat, the unions and their supporters say, is that a decision in the plaintiffs favor would encourage many workers who are perfectly happy with the work of their unions to make the economically rational decision to opt out of paying for it.
Second, although the Abood case allowed opting out of dues earmarked for political activism, opting out typically is hard to do.
“I think public sector unions have long seen this as a real threat to their continued effective existence at a time when unions are on the decline generally”.
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The court’s decision, which should come down by the end of June, could have a transformative effect on the workplace-relations landscape in the United States.
