Supreme Court justices on Tuesday announced that they were split 4- 4 on a case that could have been a major blow to public-sector unions, providing the first major example of how Justice Antonin Scalia’s death has affected the nation’s highest court.
Instead of Scalia potentially providing the deciding vote striking down a key precedent favorable to unions, the divided ruling in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association means an earlier appeals court decision affirming the status quo for government employee unions will stand.
Friedrichs challenged a 1977 precedent called Abood v. Detroit Board of Education that said that government entities could enter into contracts with labor unions that forced all of their workers to join the union or at least financially support it. The plaintiffs in Friedrichs challenged that as a violation of their First Amendment rights, arguing the union could use their dues to fund political activity that they disagreed with.
During oral arguments in January, Scalia had appeared to side with the court’s other conservatives who backed overturning Abood. That would have deprived public-sector unions, which represent about half of all organized labor in the U.S., of a major source of funding. Though the court’s most noted conservative, Scalia’s was nevertheless the wild card in Friedrichs. Some of his previous opinions had indicated that he might support Abood.
Instead, his death last month meant the court’s conservatives no longer had a potential majority to overturn Abood. The court’s official announcement Tuesday was a terse single line: “The judgment is affirmed by an equally divided court.”
The National Education Association, the parent union of the California Teachers Association, cheered the announcement, characterizing the case as little more than a “political ploy” to weaken labor. “In Friedrichs, the court saw through the political attacks on the workplace rights of teachers, educators and other public employees. This decision recognizes that stripping public employees of their voices in the workplace is not what our country needs,” said NEA President Lily Eskelsen García.
Conservatives lamented that an effort to change labor law had slipped away. The case was, they note, about whether labor organizations had the right to extract money directly from the paychecks of people who didn’t want to be in a union in the first place. “Alas. Supreme Court splits 4-4 on #Friedrichs. Forced union dues in government will perdure,” said James Sherk, research fellow at the Heritage Foundation.
