US Supreme Court Poised to Deliver Blow to Unions

California teachers generally pay around $US1,000 annually in union dues. “Really, these unions are not speaking on my behalf”. Labor officials fear the existence of unions could be threatened if workers are allowed to get all the benefits of representation without at least paying fees to cover the costs of collective bargaining.

Forced unionization of government workers may be on the brink of ending in the United States if questions asked Monday by justices of the U.S. Supreme Court are any indication.

At stake are millions of labor dollars in “agency fees” that unions collect from teachers, police and other public employees to pay for lobbying the government to raise their pay, give them more secure jobs and other similar benefits. He said fees for collective bargaining typically apply to non-political issues such as working hours and other mundane matters.

If Friedrichs ends mandated payments to unions, Blanning said, it would merely turn back the clock on his association. They said Justice Kennedy and Justice Antonin Scalia, two Republican-appointed members of the court, had previously seemed sympathetic to the problem of union free riders but on Monday offered stern critiques of the practice of charging fees.

A lawyer for the teachers, Michal Carvin, said during arguments that a decision for his clients would not affect unions representing private workers, because their employers are not subject to the First Amendment.

For example, lead plaintiff Rebecca Friedrichs disagrees with the “Cadillac” compensation packages negotiated by her union through her coerced representational dues because it threatens her state’s fiscal solvency. “That’s pretty far removed from the heart of the First Amendment”.

If the Supreme Court indeed proposes to overturn the Abood compromise, why not do so in a principled and logical manner?

Justice Elena Kagan defended the status quo, and said the challengers “come here with a heavy burden” by asking the court to overturn a precedent that has been in place for four decades and on which both government and unions have come to rely. But the Friedrichs plaintiffs argue that collective bargaining in the public sector, even on pay and conditions, is by definition political. In this sense it would be akin to a local government telling its citizens they only have to pay local taxes to collect garbage and fix roads and clean the streets if they agree with the government politically. “Should it promote teachers on the basis of seniority or on the basis of-all of those questions are necessarily political questions”.

The unions disagree with the idea that the mandatory teachers’ fees constitute an ideological imposition.

Such agency fees are permitted in private workplaces under federal law, but it took the Abood case to allow for such fees to be assessed in public sector unions since public employees aren’t covered under the federal law.

“They get reduced. They can request to get those reduced fees”, said Barnes. “Why do you think that the union would not survive without these fees charged to nonmembers of the union?”

The nation’s 25 right-to-work states already bar public employee unions from requiring membership or collecting agency fees, but those unions remain reasonably robust anyway. But in Monday’s argument, all the justices sounded as though they had made their decision.

A hotly debated legal and political issue was at the center of today’s Supreme Court hearing.