******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ********************
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*****************************************************************
NY Times, June 27, 2018
Supreme Court Delivers a Sharp Blow to Labor Unions
By Adam Liptak
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Wednesday dealt a major blow to
organized labor. By a 5-to-4 vote, with the more conservative justices
in the majority, the court ruled that government workers who choose not
to join unions may not be required to help pay for collective bargaining.
The ruling means that public-sector unions across the nation, already
under political pressure, could lose tens of millions of dollars and see
their effectiveness diminished.
The court based its ruling on the First Amendment, saying that requiring
payments to unions that negotiate with the government forces workers to
endorse political messages that may be at odds with their beliefs.
Unions say that reasoning is flawed. Nonmembers are already entitled to
refunds of payments spent on political activities, like advertising to
support a political candidate.
Collective bargaining is different, the unions say, and workers should
not be free to reap the benefits of such bargaining without paying their
fair share of the costs.
The decision could encourage many workers perfectly happy with their
unions’ work to make the economically rational decision to opt out of
paying for it.
President Trump took to Twitter to praise the decision, saying it would
be a “big loss for the coffers of the Democrats!”
---
Donald J. Trump
✔
@realDonaldTrump
Supreme Court rules in favor of non-union workers who are now, as an
example, able to support a candidate of his or her choice without having
those who control the Union deciding for them. Big loss for the coffers
of the Democrats!
---
Limiting the power of public unions has long been a goal of conservative
groups. They seemed poised to succeed in the Supreme Court in 2016, when
a majority of the justices looked ready to rule that the fees were
unconstitutional.
But Justice Antonin Scalia died not long after the earlier case was
argued, and it ended in a 4-to-4 deadlock. The new case, which had been
filed in 2015, was waiting in the wings and soon reached the Supreme
Court. Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, President Trump’s Supreme Court
appointee, voted with the majority.
The court overruled its 1977 decision in Abood v. Detroit Board of
Education, which had made a distinction between two kinds of compelled
payments. Forcing nonmembers to pay for a union’s political activities
violated the First Amendment, the court said. But it was constitutional,
the court added, to require nonmembers to help pay for the union’s
collective bargaining efforts to prevent freeloading and ensure “labor
peace.”
That distinction is untenable and unworkable, the majority said.
The court struck down an Illinois law that requires government workers
who choose not to join a union to “pay their proportionate share of the
costs of the collective bargaining process, contract administration and
pursuing matters affecting wages, hours and other conditions of
employment.” More than 20 states have similar laws.
The case, Janus v. American Federation of State, County and Municipal
Employees, No. 16-1466, was brought Mark Janus, a child support
specialist who works for the state government in Illinois. He sued the
union, saying he does not agree with its positions and should not be
forced to pay fees to support its work.
The decision is unlikely to have a direct impact on unionized employees
of private businesses, because the First Amendment restricts government
action and not private conduct. But unions now represent only 6.5
percent of private sector employees, down from the upper teens in the
early 1980s, and most of the labor movement’s strength these days is in
the public sector.
_________________________________________________________
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at:
http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
