Nicole Frattaroli thought she had covered all her bases when she moved to resign her membership in the Michigan State University Administrative Professional Association in September.
She sent a certified letter to the union the same month that its collective bargaining agreement with the university, where she worked as an information technology specialist, expired. Under Michigan’s new right-to-work law, she thought, the union would have to accept it.
Instead, the university continued to automatically deduct membership dues from her paychecks and forward them to the union. Frattaroli’s follow-up letter in December was also ignored. It wasn’t until a third inquiry in January that she received a letter in response. Michigan Education Association President Maury Koffman said her request had been denied. He explained that since the MSU union was an affiliate of the Michigan Education Association, she was required to send letters to both to resign, a rule that was news to Frattaroli. She also was told that because she hadn’t properly resigned, she now owed an additional $560 in dues to cover her membership through August.
On Friday, Frattaroli sued the Michigan Education Association and its Michigan State affiliate to force them to accept her resignation and to give her back the dues she had paid since September. Hers is far from the first case the teachers union has faced, and the union has fought tooth and nail to frustrate members’ attempts to drop their memberships.
“This latest forced-dues foul is part of union bosses’ playbook of illegal blocks and screens designed to prevent workers from exercising the protections enshrined in Michigan’s popular new right-to-work laws,” said National Right to Work President Mark Mix. The group’s legal foundation is representing Frattaroli.
The Michigan Education Association had previously limited the official time period when it would accept members’ opt-out requests to just August, which is when most teachers go on vacation. Requests sent in after that month or even prior to it were rejected. Union membership, on the other hand, was automatically renewed. If members tried to stop their dues payments, the union warned them that it would report them to collection agencies, putting their credit ratings at risk.
That one-month window was the union’s own rule. Nothing in the state’s right-to-work law required that. In September, the Michigan Employment Relations Commission ruled that the policy violated the state constitution, forcing the union to drop it.
The teachers union has used other tactics to frustrate its members. Without announcing it, in August it changed the address where members must send their opt-out letters, moving it from its headquarters in East Lansing to a separate post office box. Only a brief notice at the bottom of the members-only section of the union’s website alerted people to the change. Letters sent to the headquarters were rejected.
Michigan passed its right-to-work law in 2012. The law prohibits workers from being forced to join or otherwise financially support a union as a condition of employment. A total of 26 states have them. In states without the laws, most union contracts with management include provisions called “security clauses” requiring all workers pay some form of dues to compensate the union for its collective bargaining expenses.
Even when a state does have a right-to-work law, it can be difficult for a worker to invoke his rights. That’s because enforcing the law is largely left up to the union itself. Unions hate the laws, since they are associated with sharp declines in members and dues revenue. So they have no incentive to make it easy for their members to leave.
Many local teachers unions rushed to renegotiate their contracts before right-to-work went into effect in March 2013, since the law applied only to contracts signed after that. Many pushed for unusually long eight-10 year contracts to lock in their security clauses as long as possible.
Despite its various efforts to stymie the law, the Michigan Education Association’s membership has declined significantly since it went into effect, from just under 152,000 in 2012 to 131,000 last year, according to Labor Department filings.
A representative for the teachers union could not be reached for comment.
