Liberty Justice Center

What will happen to teachers’ unions in a world without agency fees? One large, internal union poll found that without agency fees, 35 percent of its members would remain in the union, 15 percent would leave, and fully 50 percent were undecided. Teachers’ unions are expecting membership losses after Janus, but the future of one of the country’s most powerful interest groups depends on whether declines are closer to 15 or 65 percent.

Rebecca Friedrichs is a teacher and was the lead plaintiff challenging the California Teachers Association’s “agency shop” arrangement, She joins Insight to explain why she decided to file her lawsuit and challenged the CTA all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court.

As president of AFSCME Local 3790 in New Jersey, I empathize with Phillip’s difficult position of being pitted between his personal principles and the coerced nature of the law. Like him, I have been anxiously awaiting a ruling from the Supreme Court. For me, it is the case Janus v. AFSCME, which could release me from being forced to pay a union that does not represent my best interests. Through its political activities, my union acts in ways that is opposite to my own political efforts. Masterpiece focused on the application of freedom of religion and Janus focuses on our First Amendment right to free speech. Nevertheless, the two cases have very little to do with a debate over the merits of any particular union, whether marital or labor, and everything to do with one issue: the freedom to choose.

I hope to see the Supreme Court restore my freedom of speech by ruling in favor of Mark Janus, thus freeing me and approximately five million government workers nationwide from being forced to pay a union as a condition of employment. Yet, this hope should not be misconstrued as a position against government unions in general.

Just in time for Independence Day, the U.S. Supreme Court has delivered millions into greater liberty – and a day of reckoning for public-sector union leaders.

The court struck down as unconstitutional the arrangement – heretofore enshrined in law in 22 states – that forced government workers to pay union fees for the privilege of keeping their jobs.

As organized labor braces for a Supreme Court ruling that could make it easy for public-sector workers to stop paying some dues, unions across the country are reaching out to hundreds of thousands of members to persuade them to keep paying dues.

The Service Employees International Union has sent text messages to 800,000 members as part of a program that includes meeting with workers and sending mailers to homes.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s impending ruling in a landmark labor-relations case could deal a big blow to the power of public employee unions across the country, especially in a heavily-unionized state such as New York.

The concerns and questions raised by the case, Janus vs. AFSCME, were the subject of a panel hosted by the Empire Center for Public Policy on Wednesday. State Senator Diane Savino and Daniel DiSalvo, an assistant professor at the City College of New York, discussed the case at the Albany Capital Center and Capital Tonight host Liz Benjamin moderated the debate.

Janus v. AFSCME is one of the most important Supreme Court cases this term and perhaps one of the most important in decades. It concerns a claim that under the First Amendment, unionized government workers should not be forced to subsidize union speech to keep their jobs. This issue was to be decided in 2016’s Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, but Justice Antonin Scalia’s death left the court in a 4-4 deadlock.

Most court observers expect Justice Neil Gorsuch to break this tie in Janus, so they sought to discern his views on labor matters from the recently decided Epic Systems v. Lewis case. (That decision concerned how the National Labor Relations Act and the Federal Arbitration Act interact.) The most interesting part about Janus to date, however, is what public sector unions and their allies are doing.

 Will making agency fees optional result in dramatic change?

The potential is there for dramatic change, because as of 2017, 7.2 million government workers belong to a union. Their total membership nearly equals the total membership of private sector unions, 7.6 million, despite federal, state and local government workers only comprising about 17% of the U.S. workforce. In California, state and local government unions are estimated to collect and spend over $1.0 billion every year.