The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that public sector unions for state and local employees cant force non-members to pay a fair-share union fee.
In a 5-4 ruling, the court said the extraction of agency fees from non-consenting public sector employees violates the First Amendment.
The courts conservative wing led by Justice Samuel Alito overturned a 1977 court precedent that allowed public-sector unions to accept fees from non-members to cover non-political union activities like collective bargaining.
The court said Abood was poorly reasoned and wrongly decided.
"Neither an agency fee nor any other payment to the union may be deducted from the nonmember's wages, nor may any other attempt be made to collect such a payment, unless the employee affirmatively consents to pay," Alito wrote.
"By agreeing to pay, nonmembers are waiving their First Amendment rights and such a waiver cannot be presumed."
he courts newest member, Justice Neil Gorsuch, likely cast the deciding vote in the dispute, which deadlocked the justices in a 4-4 split in a similar case in 2016 following the death of the late Justice Antonin Scalia.
Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch sided with Alito in the majority. The court's liberal wing Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer dissented.
The case centers on an Illinois law, similar to those in 22 other states, that allow public-sector unions to collect a fair-share fee from employees for non-political activities like collective bargaining, regardless of whether those employees belong to the union or not.
Mark Janus, a state child support specialist at the center of the case, argued against having to give up about $45 from each paycheck to the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Council 31. Doing so, he said, violates his First Amendment rights because it forces him to support the unions messaging.
The union, AFSCME, argues it needs the fair-share funds to offset the significant costs it incurs negotiating working conditions for all employees. State laws allowing unions to collect these fees are justified, the union said, to avoid a situation where nonunion members get a "free ride."
In a dissenting opinion, which Justices Ginsburg, Breyer and Sotomayor joined, Kagan said the courts decision will have large-scale consequences.
Public employee union will lose secure sources of financial support, she said.
State and local governments that thought fair-share provisions furthered their interests will need to find news ways of managing their work forces. Across the country, the relationships of public employees and employers will alter in both predictable and wholly unexpected ways.
A group of 15 public sector unions warned the court in a friend of the court brief that eliminating fair-share fees would eviscerate public sector unions, depriving them of resources they need to perform their essential public functions.
The elimination of fair-share fees would create an all-or-nothing choice for the workers whom unions represent: pay union dues or pay nothing but still receive the benefits a union provides, they wrote.
In that world, many rational employees will choose to become free riders.
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"I have never understood why it is greed to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else's money." Thomas Sowell