Monday the Supreme Court hears oral arguments in a case that could bring freedom from forced union fees to teachers and other public employees across the country.
In Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, Rebecca Friedrichs is asking for the right to choose whether to pay a labor union. Because California isn’t a right-to-work state, she has to pay nearly $1,000 per year in union fees in order to teach.
Those mandatory fees, the legal reasoning goes, are permissible because they cover costs CTA, CTA’s local chapter, and the National Education Association incur representing nonmembers. Forced union fees cannot be spent on politics.
But Friedrichs believes all teachers union activities — not just their open campaigning for left-wing causes and candidates — are political. As a result, she argues, making teachers pay unions violates First Amendment protections against compelled political speech.
Public-sector union bargaining over pay, benefits, and work conditions is inherently political because it always involves taxpayer money, public employees, and government services. Despite recognizing this, Supreme Court precedent treats “labor peace” as more important than workers’ free speech rights.
If the Friedrichs case prompts the Court to overturn its 1977 Abood v. Detroit Board of Education decision, millions of public employees will gain the freedom to choose whether to pay a union.
Under the status quo, if you’re a teacher or government employee living in one of 23 states without public-sector right-to-work, you can:
Choose to join the union, and pay the union
Choose not to join the union, and pay the union anyway
Choose not to join or pay the union, and… sorry, the union just had you fired from your job
Teachers union officials are, as you’d expect, furious at Friedrichs for threatening their flow of mandatory fees. The vitriol they’re lobbing at Friedrichs and her lawyers is as predictable (“Kochs!!!”) as it is dishonest.
A win for Friedrichs wouldn’t end public-sector unions. It wouldn’t restrict in any way the ability of public teachers or other government employees to organize, join, or support a union, despite breathless union warnings otherwise.
Still, union leaders will make every effort to muddy the waters at the Supreme Court.
If you’re bored Monday, try counting the ways NEA president Lily Eskelsen Garcia (2015 pay: $416,633) and American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten (2015 pay: $497,118) insist teachers should be forced to pay unions — for their own good.
I’m helping the Mackinac Center cover the Friedrichs case this month. For the latest, visit mackinac.org/friedrichs.
A ruling in Friedrichs v. CTA is expected in June.
HA did another story today, this one by HA vet writer Jazz Shaw. WaPo makes a bizarre argument.
As we’ve discussed a few times in the past, today the Supreme Court will begin hearing arguments in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association and it’s a case which could fundamentally transform the structure of union politicking in America. At the heart of it is the First Amendment question of whether or not the massively powerful teachers unions can force their members to pay dues which support the political agenda of the unions and the candidates they prop up even when they don’t agree with them. The editorial board of the Washington Post uses their pulpit on the day of these arguments to work the refs a bit and argue in favor of the unions.
In a rather shocking admission, the editors begin with a tip of the hat to the many problems inherent in these entirely political organizations.
The unions have helped persuade society to value the vital role teachers play. But they also have become an often-reactionary force, opposing reforms that are especially important to poor and minority children. Public education — and many teachers — have been ill served by seniority rules that force administrators to lay off promising teachers instead of ineffective tenured ones. Students suffer from workplace rules that make it nearly impossible to fire a certifiably bad teacher or experiment with new types of schooling. Taxpayers have to bear the costs of teacher pensions that may be excessive, sometimes at the expense of other community needs.
It’s a bit understated and leaves out a host of other sins, but let’s give credit where credit is due. They managed to at least acknowledge some of the many problems with the teachers unions across the country. But even after giving a nod to the issue which actually needs to be managed, the board goes on to say that this is no reason to stop them from seizing the pay of their teachers and using it as they please.
But as much as we agree about the harm that’s been done to public education and, in particular, to children at risk, we don’t think the answer is for the Supreme Court to give relief by overturning settled law. Unions have contributed positively in many places; their policies can be democratically influenced by their members; and their proper role should be decided politically, not in a Supreme Court decision that would inevitably be seen as favoring one party over the other, since unions have been the traditional allies of Democrats.
So let’s make sure we’re understanding the core of their argument here. They know – and acknowledge – that the teachers unions are, by definition, hugely powerful and overtly political organizations which favor one party (the Democrats) over the other, but the court shouldn’t step in here because it would make the decision appear to favor one party over the other?
The mind… it doth boggle.
As I said above, this is a free speech question at the heart of it all, but it really goes much further than that. If the teachers unions were any other sort of entity, such as a manufacturing firm, the government would have long since stepped in to to break them up under trust busting laws. They control the public school system entirely and any young person who wants to go into the field of teaching is under their thumb. It may be impossible for parents, local government or even law enforcement to fire even the worst offending teachers, but by God the unions can certainly do it if they are insufficiently pro-union before they achieve tenure.
Also, the argument which immediately crops up in cases such as this among union apologists is that “dues money can’t be used for politicking.” That’s such an obvious load of crappola that it’s not worth discussing, considering how much cash they flush into Democrat coffers for elections from the Presidency down to local school boards. And it’s yet another example of the tricks that can be played when you realize that money is fungible. It’s much the same as Planned Parenthood saying no government money goes to abortions. When you give them money which “can’t be used” for one thing, they simply spend it elsewhere for purposes they would have had to spend money on anyway and then shift those resources toward the desired goal.
This is a poor effort on the part of the WaPo editorial board. I don’t know if Ms. Friedrichs and her fellow plaintiffs will carry the day at SCOTUS, but they clearly should. If the Washington Post wants the unions to be more responsive to the will of their members without the government stepping in, allowing all the members to vote with their wallets without fear of losing their jobs might be a very good first step.
American politics will shake like an earthquake if the teachers aren't forced to bankroll the NEA by extortion, especially in non-right-to-work states, all of them deep Blue.
