Public unions see only modest decline after high-court ruling

JEFFERSON CITY, MO.» Anticipating that the U.S. Supreme Court might end mandatory union fees for public employees, some labor-friendly states enacted laws last year to protect membership rolls while unions redoubled their recruitment efforts.

Those steps appear to have paid off, at least initially.

Union membership among public employees has fallen only slightly in the nation’s most unionized states since the Supreme Court ruled a year ago that government workers no longer could be required to pay union fees, according to an analysis of federal data conducted for The Associated Press.

The decline in union membership rates has been larger in states that allowed mandatory fees to be deducted from the paychecks of public school teachers, police and other government workers than in states that had not. Yet the drop has been less than what some labor leaders had feared after the high-court decision, which reversed a 41-year-old legal precedent.

“People were saying that we were going to be buried, that this was going to be our death knell, that this was going to destroy public-sector unions in this country. And it did not do that,” said Lee Saunders, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. “As a matter of fact, I believe that we have a much more engaged membership.”

Reinvigorated union membership drives may have staved off some of the anticipated losses. The court ruling came amid a multiyear effort by AFSCME to improve one-on-one communication with current and potential members to build a stronger, more loyal membership. Other public-sector unions undertook similar efforts.

“We went back to basics, re-creating community, engaging with our members,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. “By and large, they stayed with the union.”

The Supreme Court ruled in 2018 that AFSCME could no longer deduct mandatory fees from Illinois childsupport worker Mark Janus, who had declined to join the local union. More broadly, the high court said it violated the First Amendment free-speech rights of public employees to force them to subsidize unions that might push policies they disagree with during contract negotiations.

The ruling struck down what were known as union “agency fees,” which were levied on nonmembers at rates of around three-quarters of full union dues.

Those fees were required of at least some public employees in about half of all states and the District of Columbia. They were intended to compensate unions for their collective bargaining representation, not their political activities.

Reports filed with the U.S. Department of Labor show AFSCME and the Service Employees International Union lost a combined 209,000 agency fee payers after the Supreme Court ruling. Teachers unions also lost tens of thousands of agency fee payers.

The big question was whether the court ruling also would lead to an exodus of regular union members.

Economist David Macpherson analyzed state-bystate labor force data collected by the U.S. Census Bureau’s monthly Current Population Survey. He compared average publicsector union membership rates after the Supreme Court ruling, from July 2018 through May of this year, to the same 11-month period before the ruling.

States that previously allowed mandatory agency fees for at least some public employees had a significantly higher union membership rate — about 53 percent — before the ruling, compared with a 16.6 percent unionization rate in states that did not allow such fees. Since the high court’s decision, that average membership rate fell by about 1 percentage point in agency-fees states while dropping just a quarter of a percentage point in the other states.