Supreme Court rules against public unions collecting fees from nonmembers

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/supreme-court-rules-against-public-unions-collecting-fees-for-nonmembers/2018/06/27/ccdf6bf4-7a0c-11e8-80be-6d32e182a3bc_story.html?utm_term=.1e7c15c2cd1d

by Robert Barnes and Ann E. Marimow June 27 at 5:54 PM Email the author

Conservatives on the Supreme Court said Wednesday that it was unconstitutional to allow public employee unions to require collective-bargaining fees from workers who choose not to join the union, a major blow for the U.S. labor movement.

The court, in a 5-to-4 decision, overturned a 40-year-old precedent and said forcing nonmembers to pay such fees was a violation of their free-speech rights. The rule could require workers to give financial support to public policy positions they oppose, the court said.

“States and public-sector unions may no longer extract agency fees from nonconsenting employees,” Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote for the majority. “. . . This procedure violates the First Amendment and cannot continue.”

He was joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil M. Gorsuch and Anthony M. Kennedy, on his final day on the bench before announcing his retirement.

Justice Elena Kagan wrote for the dissenting liberals, objecting to a decision that she said would “wreak havoc” by undoing labor agreements throughout the country.

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The decision came on the term’s last day and was another example of how President Trump’s selection of Gorsuch to fill the seat of Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in 2016, refortified the conservative majority. It came just hours before Kennedy announced he will leave the court at the end of July, clearing the way for a further shift to the right.

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Unions were already restricted from using the dues for political purposes such as support for candidates. But opponents of the mandatory fees say it is difficult to disentangle the two — raises for workers, for instance, might involve advocating for the government to raise taxes.

Challengers asked the court to overturn a 1977 decision, Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, that favored the unions. That ruling said states could allow public employee unions to collect fees from nonmembers to cover the costs of workplace negotiations over salaries and benefits but not the union’s political activities.

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Kagan delivered part of her dissent from the bench, a fairly rare move for her. She and Alito sit next to each other, and she began just after he finished his summary of the decision.

Kagan broadly criticized the majority, which she said had overstepped its role by intervening in a political debate and “weaponizing” the First Amendment.

And “not for the first time,” she added

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https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/06/27/617893848/is-this-supreme-court-decision-the-end-of-teachers-unions

June 27, 201810:39 AM ET
Heard on All Things Considered

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In Wisconsin, the law limiting union activity, Act 10, dramatically scaled back the union's ability to bargain. After it passed in 2011, the state affiliate of the National Education Association lost more than half its members.

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In Michigan, the researchers found, "in the three years after the reform, the state NEA lost about 21 percent of its members."

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"Doing away with agency fees," Malkus says, "that choice becomes, to pay either a thousand dollars in dues or nothing." And, he believes, many teachers, especially low-end earners, will opt for paying nothing.

Martin, the union leader in Wisconsin, heard from many of these teachers in the wake of Act 10. He says they would often ask: " 'Well, why should I pay the dues? I'm gonna get whatever you guys work hard for me anyways.' "

In economics, this is called a free-rider problem. In states that previously allowed agency fees, unions will still be legally required to represent all workers at the negotiating table — a service that workers can now enjoy for free.

"I cannot imagine we would require Bank of America to provide services to folks that they do not charge any kind of reasonable fee. It would just be unheard of," says Celine McNicholas, director of labor law and policy at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.

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If you look at the wave of teacher uprisings that swept the country this spring, the majority happened in right-to-work states where unions were small and weak (and already could not collect agency fees).

"What you see in the red state strikes was teachers fed up and unions not being strong enough to return to teachers raises and pension reforms that were acceptable to them," says AEI's Malkus.

Marianno and Strunk write, "By causing teachers unions to return to collective action on behalf of their members, the Supreme Court decision may, in the end, invigorate the unions that these court cases and the groups that sponsored them intended to incapacitate."

Agustina Paglayan is a political economist who focuses on education. She told NPR in May that, in the same states where teachers have been covered by collective-bargaining and agency fees, they have also accepted costly strike penalties. This ruling tends to erode both union power and the bargains that have upheld it. More militant grass-roots and online organizing may be the result. "You could end up having a wave of strikes in a lot more states."

McAlevey, the union organizer, agrees. So does EPI's McNicholas.

"I would point to West Virginia and Oklahoma" to see what's going to happen as a result of this decision, McNicholas says. "I think that not having effective collective bargaining, which I think will be the result, means workers will be forced to resort to other tactics to ensure their wages and fundamental benefits, and also quite frankly the quality of services they provide."

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http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2018/0518friedman.html

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Private-sector unions have a greater effect on wages and benefits for their members, but because of lower unionization rates in the private sector, they have less effect on total compensation than do public-sector unions. (See Figure 2.) While public-sector workers are more likely to belong to unions than their private-sector counterparts, private-sector unions generally have larger effects on member wages and benefits. Controlling for experience and education, for example, public-sector unions raise wages by almost 15%, compared to the over 20% increase achieved by private-sector unions. Private-sector unions have much large effects on benefits like health insurance and pensions.

Because there are now so few private-sector union members, their effect on wages and benefits for workers as a whole is much less. The greater coverage of public-sector unions means that they do more to raise wages and pensions for all workers then do private-sector unions.

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