Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is set to sign legislation on Monday that would make his state the 25th to adopt a right-to-work law, making it illegal for a worker to be required to a join a union or pay dues to one as a condition of employment.
The legislation doesn’t necessarily mean, though, that currently unionized workers would be able to immediately drop their membership once it goes into effect.
Unionized workers in Indiana and Michigan, two other Midwestern states that adopted right-to-work laws in recent years, have often found that opting out of their membership is a difficult process that can take years. That’s because federal law effectively puts the unions in charge of enforcing the law, and they often don’t make it easy for workers to leave.
Several unions in those states have said that even after right to-work laws were passed they still had legally enforceable contracts to represent the workers since those contracts pre-dated the law. Workers often are allowed to drop their membership only during brief annual periods chosen by the unions — and the workers’ union membership automatically renews if they don’t.
The same scenario may happen for Wisconsin’s private-sector workers. While the right-to-work bill that Walker has said he will sign makes it a misdemeanor to interfere with a worker’s rights, the text does not specify how current members of unions could terminate their membership. A union would be free to claim it has an existing contract to represent the worker.
“This law doesn’t make any changes to existing contract law,” said Myranda Tanck, spokeswoman for Wisconsin Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald. She said any enforcement issue regarding the new law would be left up to the local district attorney. A spokeswoman for the Wisconsin AFL-CIO labor federation did not respond to a request for comment.
The Wisconsin lawmakers appear to have anticipated the issue to some extent in their legislation. The rewritten law on collective bargaining would allow workers to provide a notice to their employer to terminate any automatic union dues deduction from their paychecks. That wouldn’t necessarily end the worker’s relationship with the union, though, which could still claim it is legally owed dues.
James Sherk, labor policy analyst for the conservative Heritage Foundation, said the Wisconsin legislation would fully go into effect once existing union-management contracts are renegotiated. “Unions can’t put the ‘pay or get fired’ clause in new contracts, and then workers can just request [to their employer] to have the dues deduction stopped.”
Union-management contracts typically run for several years. A worker under contract signed just before the right-to-work law went into effect may have to wait several years to leave the union.
Until then, the workers could be stuck paying union dues. Unions can even enlist the employer to get the money for them, says Pat Semmens, spokesman for the National Right to Work Committee. Under federal law, employers can be required to continue to deduct dues from the paychecks of employees who dropped their union membership if the union previously got a signed card from the worker authorizing deduction.
“In other words, a nonmember may have to wait a year to stop paying dues if they signed a dues authorization. However, they cannot be required to sign such an authorization,” Semmens said.
For most of the history of right-to-work laws, the question of how they should be enforced wasn’t something that came up often. Most states that adopted the laws were Southern and rural and never had much of a union tradition in the first place. It has only been recently that other states with substantial union presences, such as Indiana, Michigan and now Wisconsin, have adopted the law.
Workers in those states who thought that the new laws meant they now had the right to quit their union often discovered that they had to get permission from their union to quit.
Michigan high school teacher William “Ray” Arthur filed a complaint with his state’s employment relations commission in 2013 when the Michigan Education Association rejected his request to drop his membership despite the state adopting a right-to-work law. Arthur belatedly discovered that the teachers’ union accepted the requests only during August. “Funny [MEA] should make it August, since we are not in school at the time,” Arthur told the Washington Examiner in 2013.
After his request was rejected, Arthur was informed that if he did not pay another year’s worth of dues, the union would turn the matter over to a collection agency. Arthur says he never even knew about the August window in the first place. “They said they were not legally required to tell us about [it],” Arthur said. He dropped the complaint after the union relented and let him quit.
In October, Michigan truck driver Kathy Sulkowski filed charges with the National Labor Relations Board against the United Auto Workers, claiming it was infringing on her rights under the state’s right-to-work law by refusing to let her drop her membership.
According to her complaint, Sulkowski notified the UAW Local 600 in August of her desire to resign. On Sept. 18, Local 600 told her that her request was denied and that to be released from membership she had to show up in person at the office and provide photo identification.
