rmt
07-08-2018, 06:45 PM
Big Labor pursued a disingenuous strategy to circumvent 2014’s Harris ruling. No longer.
The Supreme Court’s Janus v. AFSCME decision barred public-sector labor unions from forcing non-members to pay agency fees. What is less well-known is that the decision also mandated prior consent to any fee payments — a so-called “opt-in” requirement that had been missing from the Court’s 2014 opinion in Harris v. Quinn, a case that applied the same forced-fee prohibition to unions representing a special sub-category of public-sector workers.
Before Harris, the unions had been collecting dues from workers, presuming them to be members — unless those workers “opted out” by written request, in which case they still had to pay fees as non-members. Many unions continued this practice after Harris, even presuming that non-members had consented to continue paying fees unless and until they opted out of those separately. This post-Harris union behavior left many workers ignorant of their right to resign and stop paying dues and non-member fees, in effect defying the will of the Court.
The sub-category of unions addressed in Harris comprises “partial public employees” (PPEs) such as home health aides and in-home child-care providers. They are private-sector workers, but they are paid using state benefit funds, and thus in some states they are dubiously considered public employees for collective-bargaining purposes. Because of the peculiar nature of PPE unions and the fact that the state automatically deducted dues and fees from workers’ paychecks, many workers did not even know they had been unionized. The opt-out procedure didn’t require the unions to enlighten them, and the unions didn’t. In fact, they did the opposite, and much more, in order preserve the flow of dues and fees into union coffers...
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/supreme-court-ruling-janus-case-no-more-opt-out-rules-for-unions/
The Supreme Court’s Janus v. AFSCME decision barred public-sector labor unions from forcing non-members to pay agency fees. What is less well-known is that the decision also mandated prior consent to any fee payments — a so-called “opt-in” requirement that had been missing from the Court’s 2014 opinion in Harris v. Quinn, a case that applied the same forced-fee prohibition to unions representing a special sub-category of public-sector workers.
Before Harris, the unions had been collecting dues from workers, presuming them to be members — unless those workers “opted out” by written request, in which case they still had to pay fees as non-members. Many unions continued this practice after Harris, even presuming that non-members had consented to continue paying fees unless and until they opted out of those separately. This post-Harris union behavior left many workers ignorant of their right to resign and stop paying dues and non-member fees, in effect defying the will of the Court.
The sub-category of unions addressed in Harris comprises “partial public employees” (PPEs) such as home health aides and in-home child-care providers. They are private-sector workers, but they are paid using state benefit funds, and thus in some states they are dubiously considered public employees for collective-bargaining purposes. Because of the peculiar nature of PPE unions and the fact that the state automatically deducted dues and fees from workers’ paychecks, many workers did not even know they had been unionized. The opt-out procedure didn’t require the unions to enlighten them, and the unions didn’t. In fact, they did the opposite, and much more, in order preserve the flow of dues and fees into union coffers...
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/supreme-court-ruling-janus-case-no-more-opt-out-rules-for-unions/