Labor leaders angrily slammed the Supreme Court’s ruling Wednesday that the mandatory fees that government workers are required to pay unions are unconstitutional, but without giving much detail.
In the many statements released following the court’s 5-4 ruling in Janus v. American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, union leaders declared the case was a sop to business and a blow to regular workers, without discussing the issues in the case.
Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO labor federation, issued a brief statement saying the court “does the bidding of corporate elites” but offered no rebuttal to the legal ruling about public-sector workers other than to say it “abandons decades of common-sense precedent in favor of greater rights for corporations.”
AFSCME’s official statement declared the ruling an “unprecedented political attack” but similarly avoided discussing any aspect of the case. The statement linked to what it promised was an “in-depth story” on the case, a 20-page document with one sentence mentioning Janus.
The Supreme Court case involved the question of whether nonunion public-sector workers can be forced to pay the union representing their workplace regular fees — dubbed “security clauses” — as a condition of employment. The plaintiff, Illinois state government worker Mark Janus, argued that the fees violated his First Amendment rights by forcing him to back a group he didn’t support.
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In most cases, the fees are automatically deducted from the workers’ checks and sent directly to the unions.
“It’s the same as their anti-‘right to work’ talking points. Unions are avoiding discussing that fact that the only thing that right to work does and the main thing that Janus v. AFSCME does is taking away a union’s ability to get a worker fired for not paying them,” said F. Vincent Vernuccio, senior fellow with the free-market Mackinac Center for Public Policy.
The fees had previously been allowed under a 1977 precedent called Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, which said that public-sector employers had the same right as private-sector ones to agree to union contracts with those fee requirements. The court’s conservatives overturned that decision Wednesday.
“It is … not disputed that the state may require that a union serve as exclusive bargaining agent for its employees — itself a significant impingement on associational freedoms that would not be tolerated in other contexts. We simply draw the line at allowing the government to go further still and require all employees to support the union irrespective of whether they share its views,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the majority.
One of the few unions to offer any sort of specific argument Wednesday on why the majority was wrong on the law was the American Federation of Teachers. “The plaintiff, Mark Janus, an Illinois social worker, claimed that paying fees violates his free speech rights. How? Because he thinks his fees implicitly support the union’s political agenda, even though these fees are not allowed to be used for political activities; the fees can be used only to bargain and administer employee contracts. Janus wants a ‘free ride.’ He wants all the benefits of a union-negotiated contract and fair representation without paying for them,” union President Randi Weingarten said.
Few others offered that level of depth, though some did address the basics of the case. The National Association of Letter Carriers noted that Janus involved “the payment required of non-union members to pay for the cost of collective bargaining services” and said the fees were “vital because such services provide benefits to members and non-members alike.” Stopping the fees was a “radical reading” of the First Amendment that “overturned long-standing precedent,” it argued.
The American Federation of Government Employees said Wednesday that Abood “allowed public-sector unions to collect fair-share fees from workers who have not joined the union yet benefit from the union’s contract and other services.” But it didn’t discuss the case further.
Other leading public-sector unions such as the National Education Association, the Service Employees International Union, and the Communication Workers of America shied away from going even that far, instead opting to call the case the work of corporate interests and right-wing groups.
“When it comes to right-to-work laws or the Janus decision, the undeniable truth that union bosses will do everything they can to avoid acknowledging that ending mandatory fees doesn’t stop a single worker from joining or paying dues to a union if they choose, it simply protects the workers who currently pay only because they’ve been forced to do so,” said National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation Vice President Patrick Semmens. The foundation represented Janus before the Supreme Court.
