Updates Archives - Stand With Workers

This is heart-wrenching

Of all of our clients’ stories, Sue Halloran’s is among the most heart-wrenching.

Sue is a senior account clerk in the business office of Inver Hills Community College. After taking the job last fall, she was approached multiple times at work by an AFSCME Council 5 representative who wanted her to join the union.

In April, 10 months after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Janus v. AFSCME, Sue was pulled out of an office training because the union representative said he needed to speak to her.

The right they don’t want us to know about

We just filed the first “Janus rights” case in Minnesota, which is also one of the first in the country! When you hear our client Susan Halloran’s story, you’ll understand why protecting workers’ Janus rights is so important.

Maryland workers want their money back

“Taking money from hardworking people without their permission is wrong and I was relieved that the Supreme Court agrees. I want my money back and so do many other state employees.”

Those are the words of Gary Mattos, a correctional dietary officer with the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services for 20 years and the lead plaintiff of our new federal class action lawsuit.

The unions’ silence speaks volumes

Sometimes what someone doesn’t say is more telling than what they do say.

That was my first thought after I saw Steve Catanese ’s email. He’s president of Service Employees International Union Local 668, which last week was sued for illegally taking union fees from more than 2,000 state social service employees in Pennsylvania.

déjà vu

It seems like we already heard the story of Janus v. AFSCME and know how it ends. Still, California is making Mike Jackson and Tory Smith sit through another telling of it.

Mike and Tory are parking staff members at the University of California San Diego. Neither were told they had a choice other than to join their government union – Teamsters Local 2010 – and pay about $600 a year in union dues. And they had no choice but to pay the union until a year ago, when the U.S. Supreme Court sided with me and workers across America by ruling we could not be forced to pay a union just to keep our public service jobs.

WSJ: Still Paying Coerced Labor Dues, Even After Janus

When the young man came by her office last spring, Cara O’Callaghan thought he was one of the students she sees regularly in the recreation

$7 million for 7,000

Big news⁠—we’ve just launched a class action lawsuit in New York, Solomon v. AFSCME District Council 37, to recoup as much as $7 million in illegal union fees for approximately 7,000 New York City government workers.

One year later, the fight isn’t over

A year ago today, June 27, 2018, my life and the lives of more than 5 million government workers changed. The Supreme Court ruled that government unions could no longer force us to pay money to support the union’s political agenda as a condition of keeping our jobs.

What impact has that had? Since the court’s decision, an estimated 400,000 public sector workers are no longer paying “agency fees” of $500 to $1,000 a year. Others are exercising their First Amendment right to leave their union, or in the case of new employees, choosing not to join a union that doesn’t represent their views.

On the road for workers’ rights

In many ways it is hard to believe it’s been almost a year since the Supreme Court made a decision in my case and restored the First Amendment rights of millions of government employees. After the decision came out, I planned to return to my job as a child support specialist for Illinois. However, I quickly saw that I needed to get out and spread the word about workers’ rights because the government unions and in many cases, employers, were not sharing the information.

Since then I’ve been on the road a lot to raise awareness of what the decision means for government employees and the ways politicians and government union officials are trying to squelch those newly restored rights.

California unions refusing to recognize workers’ rights

We have filed another lawsuit, this time on behalf of Isaac Wolf, a California government employee who was told by his union that his First Amendment rights, restored by the Supreme Court, could only be exercised during an arbitrary window of time.

Not only was Isaac Wolf denied his right to leave University Professional & Technical Employees Communications Workers of America Local 9119, when he contacted his employer, the Regents of the University of California, about the issue, he was told because of a California law, they could not talk to their employees about union membership.