Justice Kagan. ” The good news out of this case is clear: The majority declined that radical request.”
In a 5-4 ruling the Supreme Court ruled against unions in our attempt to expand fair share fee payment among home care and other public sector workers, providing the benefits of union collective bargaining to those not yet protected.
Not surprisingly, Justice Alito wrote the majority opinion.
At issue in the case was fee payment.
As I explained in an earlier post, Illinois and other non-right-to-work states allow collective bargaining. As the legal bargaining representative at our school, our Association recruited teachers to join and in return they paid dues. Teachers did not have to join our Association. But in exchange for the benefits we bargained they were required to pay a fee to our Association in return for due representation and the benefits we negotiated with the board.
The majority of the Supreme Court ruled narrowly that the the requirement of fee payment could not be extended to home care workers.
But the existing right of fair share payment was not overturned, as the Koch brothers and ALEC had hoped.
This was a bullet that we dodged.
For the time being.
Writing for the minority, Justice Kagan wrote:
For many decades, Americans have debated the pros and cons of right-to-work laws and fair-share require- ments. All across the country and continuing to the pre- sent day, citizens have engaged in passionate argument about the issue and have made disparate policy choices. The petitioners in this case asked this Court to end that discussion for the entire public sector, by overruling Abood and thus imposing a right-to-work regime for all govern- ment employees. The good news out of this case is clear: The majority declined that radical request. The Court did not, as the petitioners wanted, deprive every state and local government, in the management of their employees and programs, of the tool that many have thought neces- sary and appropriate to make collective bargaining work.
The bad news is just as simple: The majority robbed Illinois of that choice in administering its in-home care program. For some 40 years, Abood has struck a stable balance—consistent with this Court’s general framework for assessing public employees’ First Amendment claims— between those employees’ rights and government entities’ interests in managing their workforces. The majority today misapplies Abood, which properly should control this case. Nothing separates, for purposes of that decision, Illinois’s personal assistants from any other public em- ployees. The balance Abood struck thus should have defeated the petitioners’ demand to invalidate Illinois’s fair-share agreement. I respectfully dissent.
Fred Klonsky 