Ruling is a major loss for labor
Supreme Court, in a 5-4 vote, says unions can’t force government workers to pay fees
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court dealt a major blow Wednesday to organized labor. By a 5-4 vote, with the more conservative justices in the majority, the court ruled that government workers who choose not to join unions may not be required to help pay for collective bargaining.
Forcing those workers to finance union activity violated the First Amendment, Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the majority. “We conclude that this arrangement violates the free speech rights of nonmembers by compelling them to subsidize private speech on matters of substantial public concern,” he wrote. The ruling means that public-sector unions across the nation, already under political pressure, could lose tens of millions of dollars and see their ef- fectiveness diminished.
“We recognize that the loss of payments from nonmembers may cause unions to experience unpleasant transition costs in the short term, and may require unions to make adjustments in order to attract and retain members,” Alito wrote. “But we must weigh these disadvantages against the considerable windfall that unions have received” over the years.
Chief Justice John Roberts
and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch joined the majority opinion, which overruled a fourdecade-old precedent.
Justice Elena Kagan summarized her dissent from the bench, a sign of profound disagreement.
“There is no sugarcoating today’s opinion,” she wrote. “The majority overthrows a decision entrenched in this nation’s law — and in its economic life — for over 40 years.”
“As a result,” she wrote, “it prevents the American people, acting through their state and local officials, from making important choices about workplace governance. And it does so by weaponizing the First Amendment, in a way that unleashes judges, now and in the future, to intervene in economic and regulatory policy.”
Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor joined the dissent.
The decision struck down an Illinois law that required government workers who chose not to join a union to “pay their proportionate share of the costs of the collective bargaining process, contract administration and pursuing matters affecting wages, hours and other conditions of employment.” More than 20 states have laws that require such “agency fees.” Texas is not one of those states.
The majority based its ruling on the First Amendment, saying that requiring payments to unions that negotiate with the government forces workers to endorse political messages that may be at odds with their beliefs.
Unions say that reasoning is flawed. Nonmembers are already entitled to refunds of payments spent on political activities, like advertising to support a political candidate.
Collective bargaining is different, the unions say, and workers should not be free to reap the benefits of such bargaining without paying their fair share of the costs. The decision could encourage many workers perfectly happy with their unions’ work to make the economically rational decision to opt out of paying for it.
President Donald Trump took to Twitter to praise the decision, saying it would be a “big loss for the coffers of the Democrats!”
The case, Janus v. American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, No. 16-1466, was brought by Mark Janus, a child support specialist who works for the state government in Illinois. He sued the union, saying he did not agree with its positions and should not be forced to pay fees to support its work.
Wednesday’s ruling overruled the court’s 1977 decision in Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, which had made a distinction between two kinds of compelled payments. Forcing nonmembers to pay for a union’s political activities violated the First Amendment, the court said. But it was constitutional, the court added, to require nonmembers to help pay for the union’s collective bargaining efforts to prevent freeloading and ensure “labor peace.”
The decision is unlikely to have a direct effect on unionized employees of private businesses, because the First Amendment restricts government action and not private conduct. But unions now represent only 6.5 percent of private sector employees, and most of the labor movement’s strength these days is in the public sector.