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Supreme Court Ruling Allows Some Public Workers to Opt Out of Union Fees - New York Times

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Business Day |Supreme Court Ruling Allows Some Public Workers to Opt Out of Union Fees



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The Supreme Court ruled narrowly on Monday that some government employees did not have to pay any fees to labor unions representing them, but the court decision declined to strike down a decades-old precedent that required many public-sector workers to pay union fees.


Writing the majority 5-4 opinion, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. concluded that there was a category of government employee — a partial public employee — who can opt out of joining a union and not be required to contribute dues to that labor group.


Justice Alito wrote that home-care aides who are typically employed by an ill or disabled person with Medicaid’s paying their wages would be classified as partial public employees, which would not be the same as public-school teachers or police officers who work directly for the government.


Because states often set wages for partial public employees like home-care aides and because unions often do not conduct collective bargaining for them, these aides cannot be required to pay union fees, Justice Alito wrote. He wrote that requiring these home-care aides to pay would be a violation of their First Amendment rights.


The case, Harris v. Quinn, was brought by eight Illinois workers who provided home health care to Medicaid recipients. They asked the court to overrule a 1977 decision that declared that government employees can be required to pay fees to unions for representing them and administering their contracts even if they disagree with the union’s positions. The majority declined to overrule that foundational decision, Abood v. Detroit Board of Education — a move that could have significantly cut into the membership and treasuries of public-sector unions.


Illinois and numerous other states require government workers, whether or not they opt to join a union, to pay “fair share” fees to finance a union’s collective bargaining efforts to prevent freeloading and to ensure “labor peace.” But the court in Abood held that workers could not be required to help pay for activities that were purely political, like a union’s lobbying the legislature or campaigning for particular candidates.


The question in Monday’s decision, Harris v. Quinn, No. 11-681, was just where to draw that line.


The National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation represented the Illinois workers and had argued that Illinois was violating the First Amendment by requiring that government workers pay compulsory fees to unions even when they disagreed with the unions’ positions. The foundation argued that most of what public-sector unions did was inherently political, partly because they rely on the government to pay their members’ wages, pensions and other benefits.


But the Service Employees International Union and the Obama administration urged the court to uphold the legality of “fair-share fees.”


Ever since the Supreme Court agreed to hear this case, labor leaders have voiced fears that a decision banning such dues could badly weaken public-sector unions and their treasuries by causing a million or more government workers nationwide to opt out of paying any representation fees to the unions at their workplaces.



During oral arguments in January, Justice Elena Kagan, said the position taken by the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation “would radically restructure the way workplaces across this country are run.”


But Justice Anthony Kennedy asked whether it would be constitutional for a union to “take money from an employee who objects to the union’s position on fundamental political grounds.”


In a decision two years ago, Justice Alito opened the door to the ruling on Monday. In that case, Knox v. Service Employees International Union, the union required workers to pay a special midyear assessment to finance campaign activities on two California ballot measures — although the union gave workers the right to opt out.


Writing for the majority, Justice Alito ruled that the ability to opt out was not enough. “This aggressive use of power by the S.E.I.U. to collect fees from nonmembers is indefensible,” he wrote at the time. “When a public-sector union imposes a special assessment or dues increase,” he added, the union “may not exact any funds from nonmembers without their affirmative consent.” He wrote that the union must send a notice “allowing nonmembers to opt in to the special fee rather than requiring them to opt out.”


In that case, Justice Alito voiced discomfort with the court’s previous objections to so-called free-riders — preventing nonmembers from benefiting from the union’s collective-bargaining activities without paying for them. He wrote that concerns about free-riding “are generally insufficient to overcome First Amendment objections” and are “something of an anomaly.”


Correction: June 30, 2014

An earlier version of this article misstated the middle initial of a Supreme Court justice. He is Samuel A. Alito Jr., not Samuel J.




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