Schools are an unspoken target of anti-union lawsuit
Peter Schrag, former editorial page editor and columnist of the Sacramento Bee, has written about education and other issues in California for more than 40 years. He is also the author, most recently, of “When Europe Was a Prison Camp: Father and Son Memoirs, 1940-41.”
Given the drift of the justices’ questions during oral arguments in the Supreme Court last week (Jan. 11), it’s highly likely the Court will overturn its own 40-year-old precedent and outlaw the fees that all public employees – even non-union members – must pay to the public-sector unions that are legally required to represent them.
That would be a three-fer for the conservative groups that brought the case: Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association. It will hit not only the unions, which may lose a significant part of their revenue, but the Democrats, who rely in significant part on public-sector union support for their campaign funding, and the public schools.
Like the controversial 2010 decision in Citizens United, another decision that overturned long-standing precedents, this case, as Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank put it, “is about campaign finance,” a gift to the Republicans this November. But it’s also about a lot more – public schools themselves – little of which was mentioned in the Court last week.
The nominal plaintiffs are Rebecca Friedrichs, an elementary school teacher in Anaheim, and nine other California public school teachers who contend that as non-members, the “agency fees” – sometimes called “fair share” dues – they’re required to pay to the CTA violate their free speech rights.
They say they don’t support many of the positions the CTA takes. They can already choose not to pay the part that supports those union activities that are officially political, like campaigns for candidates and initiatives. But they contend that almost everything the union does – negotiating for higher wages, for example, which impinges on that quintessentially political matter, the budget – is political.
Justice Antonin Scalia and the Court’s other conservatives echoed that reasoning during this week’s arguments. “Almost everything that is collectively Schools are an unspoken target of anti-union lawsuit | EdSource:
