Conservative US justices prepared to deliver blow to unions

In the Friedrichs case before the U.S. Supreme Court, the core of union-supporters’ argument is that government employees should be forced to pay fees to a union because they benefit from union activities.

Williams, who helped draft the Pennsylvania law, says the fees cover the costs of negotiating the wages and benefits non-members enjoy but the plaintiffs maintain unions are purely political organizations even when they’re negotiating contracts and say mandatory dues violate the First Amendment. While dues might cover the cost of some of the union’s political activities, “fair share” fees are restricted to paying for collective bargaining, grievances and other non-political services, the law professor said.

The Supreme Court appeared to favor barring public unions from charging fees to non-members yesterday during oral arguments in a case union advocates said would spell disaster for workers. But in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, SCOTUS heard only one argument for 80 minutes Monday.

Lofty and comforting words for public unions.

Unions that represent relatively highly paid workers such as teachers, cops, firefighters and engineers would probably weather the storm fairly well.

The unions and their defenders argue that allowing employees to opt out of the dues would make nonunion workers “free riders”.

At the center of the case is a California public-school teacher named Rebecca Friedrichs. He believes this could give public employee unions an incentive to be more responsive to their members.

Laurel Salerno-White, president of the Fairfield-Suisun Unified Teachers Association, with some 1,000 members, asserted that the Kochs “have a vested interest in destroying unions – they want to pay their workers less – but all unions do better when their workers are strong”. Under that scenario, employees outside the unions would not receive, for example, negotiated pay raises or union representation in disciplinary matters.

The plaintiffs argue that the labyrinthine opt-out procedures violate First Amendment free-speech rights.

Before reaching the Supreme Court, a federal district court ruled against the teachers, pointing to the precedent set in Abood, a ruling that was affirmed by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

“The union is basically making the teachers “compelled-riders” on issues with which they strongly disagree”, he said. In that case, a 5-4 majority of the Court declined to overturn Abood.

“It’s clearly part of a larger effort to undermine public-sector unions, which is really where the strength of the labor movement stands today”, Jeff Grabelsky of Cornell University’s Worker Institute told NBC News. But while this may seem like a tangential dispute, the outcome of the case will matter a great deal to many labor unions nationwide.

And, finally, a ruling for the teachers would overturn an nearly 40-year-old Supreme Court precedent that is the basis for collective bargaining agreements affecting millions of public employees around the country. The Justices are hard to predict, but a majority seems prepared to rule that it is unconstitutional for governments to coerce workers to pay agency fees to government unions.

But according to David Frederick, a lawyer for the union, the positions the union takes in contract negotiations are outside of what is typically protected by the First Amendment, as they involve what he contends are “bread-and butter employment issues”.