Public unions face Supreme Court test

Justices will hear arguments over compulsory fees.

FRESNO, CALIF. — Harlan Elrich is a high school teacher in California, and that means he must pay about $970 a year to a labor union. He teaches math, and he said the system did not add up.

“I get to choose what movie I want to go see,” Elrich said. “I get to choose what church I want to go to. I get to choose what gym I want to join.”

He should have the same choice, he said, about whether to support a union.

Elrich and nine other California teachers have sued the union, saying they are being forced to pay to support positions with which they disagree, in violation of the First Amendment.

Their lawsuit, if it is successful, will be the culmination of a decadeslong legal campaign to undermine public unions.

And there is good reason to think they will win. The Supreme Court, which will hear arguments in the case Monday, has t wice suggested that the First Amendment bars forcing government workers to make payments to unions.

“Because a public-sector union takes many positions during collective bargaining that have powerful political and civic consequences, the compulsory fees constitute a form of compelled speech and association that imposes a significant impingement on First Amendment rights,” Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote for the majorit y in 2012 in one of the cases. Inviting a new legal challenge, he wrote, “We do not revisit today whether the court’s former cases have given adequate recognition to the critical First Amendment rights at stake.”

The new case is that challenge. The court’s decision, expected by June, will affect millions of government workers of all kinds and may deal a sharp financial and political blow to public unions.

The ruling is unlikey to have a direct impact on unionized employees of private businesses, as the First Amendment restricts government action and not private conduct.

“It’s scary,” said Steve Rosenthal, a former AFLCIO political director, noting that “most of the growth in the labor movement over the last few decades has been in the public sector.”

“It’s part of a concerted effort trying to dismantle the labor movement and to weaken workers’ rights in this country,” he added. “At the same that we are facing a near crisis in the elimination of the middle class, people are also trying to destroy one of the main vehicles to the middle class.”

Limiting the power of public unions has long been a goal of conservative groups, and some California teachers detected a political agenda in Elrich’s lawsuit, which was organized by the Center for Individual Rights, a libertarian group partly financed by conservative foundations.