Why the Supreme Court Should Leave Well Enough Alone and Let Workers Build Unions
A decision against the California Teachers Association is a decision in favor of greed.
Current discussions regarding theFriedrichs v. California Teachers Association case now before the U.S. Supreme Court are missing the critical implication of this debate. The case revolves around whether a public sector union employer negotiated collective bargaining agreement can include a provision for what is known as “agency fee.” Agency fee refers to a payment that employees who choose not to join a labor union pay the union for purposes of representation. It is not, contrary to some statements in the media, union dues. It is something very different.
News reports regarding the Friedrichs case suggest that the main threat to unions and workers posed by the elimination of agency fee is the draining of union resources that can be used for political action, a major objective of the political right. Yet that threat, while real, is secondary to the more fundamental threat: the elimination of resources badly needed in order to represent workers in their work lives.
Central to the National Labor Relations Act, which has guided labor relations since its passage in 1935, and the subsequent Supreme Court decision upholding it in 1937, are two notions: first, that the public policy of the United States was to support collective bargaining and industrial peace, both of which were seen as crucial cornerstones to labor/employer relations in the USA. Second, that a union selected by a vote of eligible workers is the exclusive representative of the workers of the particular bargaining unit.
The Court has been very clear, especially since its seminal ruling in Steele v. Louisville Railroad (1944), that a labor union must represent the collective interests of the workforce and must also represent the interests of individual workers who are threatened by actions on the part of management that allegedly violate the collective bargaining agreement. The Court has maintained that the union must represent such workers irrespective of union membership.
What does this mean concretely? It means that an individual worker who chooses not to join the union that represents his or her bargaining unit will benefit by what the union negotiates and can go to the union and demand representation in the face of any contract violation. Thus, a non-union worker can gain all of the benefits of representation yet pay nothing. This defines “right to work,” the clear intent of which is to make it exceedingly difficult for a labor Why the Supreme Court Should Leave Well Enough Alone and Let Workers Build Unions | Alternet:
