Janus v. AFSCME

Teacher op-ed: In my home state of Alaska, teachers and other public employees are forced to pay fees to unions they didn’t choose to represent them, in order to hold the jobs they love.

Before moving to Alaska, I was a teacher in Idaho, a right-to-work state, where membership in a union is a choice. I chose not to belong.

The United States Supreme Court has just delivered the biggest victory for workers’ rights in a generation. The case is Janus v. AFSCME. The plaintiff is Mark Janus, a child-support specialist who works for the state of Illinois. And I’m proud that the litigation firm of which I am president, the Liberty Justice Center, represented Mark in this landmark case.

The government can no longer force its employees to pay a union as a condition of their employment. That’s what the Supreme Court decided on Wednesday in the case Janus v. American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.

This decision is life-changing for about 5 million government workers in 22 states, who have been forced to give part of every paycheck to a government union just to do their jobs.

For 41 years, it’s been individual workers who have been unfairly silenced by having their voice in whether to join a public-sector union stripped from them. That stops now.

The state will stop deducting agency fees from workers who have opted out of the union, effective immediately.

As of June 27, the state of Illinois will no longer deduct union agency fees from the paychecks of nonmember public employees. Previously, Illinois workers were forced to pay fees to government unions as a condition of their employment.

ALBANY – The Supreme Court ruling Wednesday that unions cannot collect fees from non-members could have wide implications across New York, which has the nation’s most heavily unionized public sector.

Unions in New York derided the groundbreaking decision by the closely divided Supreme Court as it may weaken their membership, but business groups and union critics applauded the measure. New York’s labor leaders said they will work hard to encourage public workers to continue to pay all fees and dues.

New York has the highest percentage of union workers in the nation.

The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 Wednesday that nonunion government workers can’t be forced to pay dues or other fees to support a union, further diminishing the power of organized labor and setting up what right-to-work proponents called the “hard work” of protecting free speech rights for the nation’s government employees.

Right-to-work advocates also expressed concern about what they see as ongoing conflicts of interest between public employee unions and the government officials whom those same unions help elect into positions of influence over union contracts negotiated at taxpayer expense.

In a landmark decision for First Amendment rights, the U.S. Supreme Court today ruled that public employees cannot be compelled to pay union fees as a condition of employment. The 5-4 ruling in Janus v. AFSCME restores the First Amendment rights of freedom of association and free speech to more than five million government employees nationwide.

The ruling appears to require that employers of “fair share” fee payers must stop deducting fees immediately until they have affirmative consent from the employees to do so.  Center of the American Experiment estimates that 10,000 or more public employees who pay fair share fees will immediately see an increase in their paycheck with the end of forced union fees.

In its 5-4 ruling Wednesday in Janus vs. AFSCME (American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees), the Supreme Court overturned decades-old precedent that allowed government unions to require public employees to pay union fees or risk being fired.

Now millions of teachers, police officers, firefighters and other government employees across the country gain the freedom to decide if paying a union is a worthwhile proposition. This is how it should have always been – no one should be forced to finance an organization he or she disagrees with