BREAKING: The Biggest Legal Attack On Unions In Decades Is Dead
When the Supreme Court met last January to hear an aggressive attempt to defund public sector unions, the news looked grim for organized workers. All five of the Court’s conservatives seemed ready to accept the plaintiffs’ legal arguments, a result that would have potentially had catastrophic financial consequences for many unions.
Then Justice Antonin Scalia died, and the anti-union litigants lost the fifth vote they needed to prevail.
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court announced the widely expected consequence of Scalia’s encounter with his own mortality. In a single-sentence order, the Supreme Court announced that the judgment of a lower court rejecting this effort to defund public sector unions “is affirmed by an equally divided court.” Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association is dead. A four-decade-old opinion protecting public sector unions shall live to see another day.
Friedrichs was an attack on what are alternatively called “agency fees” or “fair share fees.” As ThinkProgress previously explained,
Unions are required by law to bargain on behalf of every worker in a unionized shop, even if those workers opt not to join the union. As such, non-members receive the same higher wages (one study found that workers in unionized shops enjoy a wage premium of nearly 12 percent) and benefits enjoyed by their coworkers who belong to the union.
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The purpose of these fees is to ensure that non-members do not get something for nothing; they require those non-members to pay their share of the costs of obtaining the benefits of being in a union.
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2016/03/29/3764288/breaking-the-biggest-legal-attack-on-unions-in-decades-is-dead/
So... Scalia's death has turned into another benefit for us. Sorry, i know that's a horrible thing to say, but it's the truth.
= new reply since forum marked as read
