Supreme Court Delivers a Sharp Blow to Labor Unions

[A coordinated effort by some of the right's biggest contributors fueled the case.]

Limiting the power of public unions has long been a goal of conservative groups. They seemed poised to succeed in the Supreme Court in 2016, when a majority of the justices looked ready to rule that the fees were unconstitutional.

But Justice Antonin Scalia died not long after the earlier case was argued, and it ended in a 4-to-4 deadlock. The new case, which had been filed in 2015, was waiting in the wings and soon reached the Supreme Court. Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, President Trump's Supreme Court appointee, voted with the majority.

The court overruled its 1977 decision in Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, which had made a distinction between two kinds of compelled payments. Forcing nonmembers to pay for a union's political activities violated the First Amendment, the court said. But it was constitutional, the court added, to require nonmembers to help pay for the union's collective bargaining efforts to prevent freeloading and ensure "labor peace."

That distinction is untenable and unworkable, the majority said.

The court struck down an Illinois law that requires government workers who choose not to join a union to "pay their proportionate share of the costs of the collective bargaining process, contract administration and pursuing matters affecting wages, hours and other conditions of employment." More than 20 states have similar laws.

The case, Janus v. American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, No. 16-1466, was brought Mark Janus, a child support specialist who works for the state government in Illinois. He sued the union, saying he does not agree with its positions and should not be forced to pay fees to support its work.

The decision is unlikely to have a direct impact on unionized employees of private businesses, because the First Amendment restricts government action and not private conduct. But unions now represent only 6.5 percent of private sector employees, down from the upper teens in the early 1980s, and most of the labor movement's strength these days is in the public sector.

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