A class action lawsuit alleges that Washington state officials are conspiring with a public sector union to ignore a recent Supreme Court ruling that said workers couldn’t be forced to pay union dues. The lawsuit, filed Thursday by the nonprofit Freedom Foundation, seeks to end the forced dues deductions and allow as many as 300,000 state employees to cut ties with the union and demand recompense and damages.
The lawsuit, Belgau v. Inslee, is based on the Supreme Court’s June decision in Janus v. AFSCME. The majority in Janus said it was unconstitutional to force public sector workers to support a union without their “affirmative consent.”
Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson, a Democrat, and the Washington Federation of State Employees, a branch of AFSCME, both contend they can still automatically deduct union fees from state employees’ paychecks if they signed waivers for that purpose prior to Janus.
In effect, the lawsuit is about what “affirmative consent” actually means. In the wake of Janus, unions and their allies have sought to define it as broadly as possible. Fair share fees represent a major part of public sector unions’ revenue, and by keeping them flowing, unions and their allies in politics hope to blunt the impact of Janus. A determination that workers can quit their union whenever they want to would be a harsh financial blow to the unions.
“The state and the unions are determined to act as though the Janus ruling affects only those workers who successfully opt out,” said Freedom Foundation Litigation Counsel James Abernathy. “But it goes a lot farther than that. Janus puts the burden of proof on the union to prove a worker actually wants to be a dues-paying member. It can’t simply assume they do until informed otherwise, nor can the workers be bullied into waiving rights they don’t realize they have.”
Public sector union contracts have commonly featured provisions – dubbed “security clauses” or “fair share fees” – forcing government employees to either join the union or pay it a regular fee as a condition of employment. In theory, the fees cover the cost of the union’s collective bargaining on behalf of workers. The Janus ruling said such fees violate workers’ First Amendment rights by forcing them support union political activity that they may disagree with.
But the ruling has not stopped Ferguson and WFSE from continuing to deduct dues, even from workers who said in writing they wanted to opt out. “The Janus decision does not impact any agreements between a union and its members to pay union dues, and existing membership cards or other agreements by union members to pay dues should continue to be honored,” Ferguson said in a statement following the Supreme Court’s decision.
The lawsuit alleges that “Defendants conspired to deprive Plaintiffs and class members of their First Amendment rights by unlawfully deducting union dues/fees from Plaintiffs’ and class members’ wages. There was an agreement to do so and a meeting of the minds to pursue this objective and Defendants took several overt acts… to accomplish this objective.”
Representatives for the union and the state attorney general’s office could not be reached for comment.
This is the second major class action lawsuit the Freedom Foundation has filed against the state government on behalf of public sector workers and invoking Janus. Last month it sued the state and the Service Employees International Union, seeking damages on behalf of potentially thousands of state-subsidized in-home caregivers, arguing that the state and the union conspired to divert subsidy money from caregivers who had no intention of joining SEIU.
