The fight against forced union fees isn’t over. Trey Kovacs reports:
Despite a Supreme Court ruling last year that forcing public workers to pay union fees as a condition of employment goes against First Amendment free speech rights, public employees are still forced to associate with a union and let the union speak for them, no matter how strongly an employee disagrees with that speech.
Dues or no dues, the vast majority of state laws still deem government unions as “exclusive representatives” that speak on behalf of all employees at a workplace, including nonmembers who have refused to join the union.
That soon may change. The Supreme Court has been asked to review if mandatory exclusive representation by a union violates the First Amendment right of those who declined to join the union. The lawsuit was brought by St. Cloud State University professor Kathleen Uradnik. Under Minnesota law, she is forced to have the Inter Faculty Organization represent her and speak on her behalf. In addition, the law requires state employers to listen to an exclusive representative before determining work terms and conditions. Given the union’s monopoly status, individual employees like Uradnik are prohibited from negotiating directly with their employer and must work under a union-negotiated contract.
The Supreme Court should hear her case because, as the court recognized in last year’s case, Janus v. AFSCME, exclusive representation is “a significant impingement on associational freedoms that would not be tolerated in other contexts.”
[Trey Kovacs, “Even After Janus, Unions Are Still Wrongly Forcing Speech on Public Employees,” Competitive Enterprise Institute, January 21]
