On Monday, January 11, the Supreme Court will begin hearing oral arguments in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, a case that began working its way through California courts in the spring of 2013. Ostensibly concerned with protecting the free speech rights of public sector workers, Friedrichs’s outcome will in reality decide the viability of public sector unions in the future.
It challenges a key piece of funding unions:
At the core of the case are “agency fees,” sometimes called “fair share fees.” Agency fees work like this: Public sector unions are required to cover all employees in a given bargaining unit, whether the employees opt into union membership or not. Public sector employees (which include EMTs, firefighters, public school teachers, social workers, and more) thus pay agency fees to their respective unions even if they are not union members, because public sector unions work on behalf of everyone in their bargaining unit, not just union members.
Agency fees do not fund unions’ political activities, but rather strictly the costs of union grievance-handling, organizing, and collective bargaining. In the 1977 caseAbood v. Detroit Board of Education, the Supreme Court upheld the right of public sector unions to extract agency fees from public sector workers, and found that agency fees do not violate employees’ freedom of speech, so long as they do not fund unions’ political activities.
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In other words, though Friedrichs has been brought on behalf of teachers in the cause of free speech, its implications involve all public sector workers, and the matter at hand is really the weakening of public sector unions. If the court rules against unions’ right to collect agency fees, unions would still be obligated to bargain on behalf of and represent entirely non-paying employees. At that point, it would be reasonable for union members to leave their unions and keep their dues and representation, which would collapse unions under the weight of so many free riders. In essence, this case threatens to bleed unions’ financial resources while giving workers the option of contributing nothing to them.