Organized labor, already reeling from a potentially major financial hit thanks to a Supreme Court ruling last week that could result in millions of public-sector workers cutting off funding, could be subject to another blow from the justices: class-action suits from those workers seeking to get paid back from the unions.
In a little-noticed action, the Supreme Court invalidated a ruling last week by the 7th Circuit Court denying class-action certification in a case called Riffey v. Rauner. The case involved nonunion state-subsidized Illinois home healthcare workers seeking to be repaid the funds that for years they were forced to give to the union that ostensibly represented them.
The justices in effect told the lower court to do it again in light of their ruling last week in the case Janus v. American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. Janus found that coerced dues from nonunion public-sector workers were unconstitutional.
The lower court could simply reaffirm its earlier ruling in Riffey, but the Supreme Court’s move indicates it could be open to an appeal of that. A win for the plaintiffs in either scenario could be a huge blow to public-sector union finances. The Riffey case alone covers 80,000 state-subsidized homecare workers and seeks $32 million in funds from the union involved, Service Employees International Union Healthcare Illinois & Indiana.
“The Riffey case is big even on its own terms. But it has implications for other cases. If individuals sue on behalf of employees to recover back money taken from them under Janus, they’ll run into the same class-certification issues that Riffey has encountered. So how the court resolves Riffey could have implications for any number of future cases,” said Bill Messenger, attorney for the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation. Messenger represented the clients in both Janus and Riffey.
Scott Kronland, attorney for the SEIU chapter, said there was no reason to think the 7th Circuit would rule any differently this time and little reason to think the Supreme Court would take up an appeal. “The Riffey case just involves the question of class certification and it was denied for multiple reasons. What happened in Janus isn’t going to change the determination that class action was properly denied,” Kronland said.
Riffey v. Rauner was originally titled Harris v. Quinn and was itself a major Supreme Court ruling in 2014. The case involved whether the subsidized home healthcare workers were in fact state employees eligible for unionization, a policy change first implemented in 2004 by then-Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, a Democrat and staunch union ally. SEIU Healthcare initially organized the homecare workers without a formal vote after Blagojevich accepted the union’s claim to have majority support among them. In the decade following that, numerous Democrat-leaning states accepted union bids to represent their subsidized homecare workers, automatically deducting union dues from the homecare worker’s subsidy checks. In many cases, the workers, most of whom simply took care of invalid family members, were never even aware that they had been unionized.
The Supreme Court ruled in Harris v. Quinn that the Illinois healthcare workers were never state employees in the first place and therefore couldn’t be organized. Following that, the plaintiffs in Harris v. Quinn sued to be paid back the fees the union had gotten from them. The name of the case was later changed to reflect that Republican Bruce Rauner was now Illinois governor and that lead plaintiff Pamela Harris had dropped out. Harris had been under a branch of the Illinois subsidy program that hadn’t been unionized and therefore she wasn’t eligible to be part of a class action.
The 7th Circuit rejected the class-certification request, saying there was insufficient evidence to believe that most of the Illinois healthcare workers did not support a union and that the plaintiffs couldn’t show that a class-action suit was better than letting individual homecare workers sue the union if they chose. The Supreme Court invalidated that ruling and told the lower court to reconsider it in light of Janus.
“The union argued, and the 7th Circuit agreed, that you couldn’t prove that the individuals didn’t want the union to take their money. In other words, that an objection was required. That brought up the opt-in/opt-out issue that Janus resolved. Janus said, ‘No, you need affirmative consent from somebody before you can take their money,'” Messenger said.
Exactly what defines affirmative consent is unclear. Unions have argued that workers signing documents should count like any other contract. Maliee Smith, staff attorney for the conservative Illinois Policy Institute, argues that Janus set the bar much higher and it invalidated such signatures. “Those who chose to be members were not presented with constitutional options, meaning that consent was not fully informed,” she said in an analysis of the Janus ruling.
Both sides in Riffey v. Rauner will present new arguments by this fall. It is unclear when the appeals court will issue a new ruling.
A spokesperson for SEIU Healthcare Illinois & Indiana could not be reached for comment.
