#BothSides :queenhillary:
#LesserEvils
#NeoliberalShills :drakeumad:
Supreme Court Delivers a Sharp Blow to Labor Unions
June 27, 2018
Mark Janus spoke to the news media outside the Supreme Court in February. Mr. Janus, who works for the state of Illinois, sued the union that represents state employees, saying he does not agree with its positions and should not be forced to pay fees to support its work.Jacquelyn Martin/Associated Press
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Wednesday dealt a major blow to organized labor. By a 5-to-4 vote, with the more conservative justices in the majority, the court ruled that government workers who choose not to join unions may not be required to help pay for collective bargaining.
The ruling means that public-sector unions across the nation, already under political pressure, could lose tens of millions of dollars and see their effectiveness diminished.
The court based its ruling on the First Amendment, saying that requiring payments to unions that negotiate with the government forces workers to endorse political messages that may be at odds with their beliefs.
Unions say that reasoning is flawed. Nonmembers are already entitled to refunds of payments spent on political activities, like advertising to support a political candidate.
Collective bargaining is different, the unions say, and workers should not be free to reap the benefits of such bargaining without paying their fair share of the costs.
The decision could encourage many workers perfectly happy with their unions’ work to make the economically rational decision to opt out of paying for it.
Limiting the power of public unions has long been a goal of conservative groups. They seemed poised to succeed in the Supreme Court in 2016, when a majority of the justices looked ready to rule that the fees were unconstitutional.
But Justice Antonin Scalia died not long after the earlier case was argued, and it ended in a 4-to-4 deadlock. The new case, which had been filed in 2015, was waiting in the wings and soon reached the Supreme Court. Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, President Trump’s Supreme Court appointee, voted with the majority.
The court overruled its 1977 decision in Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, which had made a distinction between two kinds of compelled payments. Forcing nonmembers to pay for a union’s political activities violated the First Amendment, the court said. But it was constitutional, the court added, to require nonmembers to help pay for the union’s collective bargaining efforts to prevent freeloading and ensure “labor peace.”
That distinction is untenable and unworkable, the majority said.
The court struck down an Illinois law that requires government workers who choose not to join a union to “pay their proportionate share of the costs of the collective bargaining process, contract administration and pursuing matters affecting wages, hours and other conditions of employment.” More than 20 states have similar laws.
The case, Janus v. American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, No. 16-1466, was brought Mark Janus, a child support specialist who works for the state government in Illinois. He sued the union, saying he does not agree with its positions and should not be forced to pay fees to support its work.
The decision is unlikely to have a direct impact on unionized employees of private businesses, because the First Amendment restricts government action and not private conduct. But unions now represent only 6.5 percent of private sector employees, down from the upper teens in the early 1980s, and most of the labor movement’s strength these days is in the public sector
i dont know why anyone wants to pretend that that is a sustainable promise. it clearly isnt. where the fukk is that money supposed to come from to pay people for not working?