Anyone who thinks government employee unions will simply fold their tents and steal quietly away into the night when the U.S. Supreme Court next summer rules in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association that public workers can’t be forced to pay union dues or fees hasn’t been paying close enough attention to how organizations like SEIU, AFSCME and others operate.

Simply put, it’s one thing to pass statutes or affirm rights. It’s something else again to enforce those rulings when the state’s entire legal and political apparatus remains under the thumb of the very unions whose abuses the laws were written to eliminate.

Labor leaders have been nothing if not consistent on that point. We saw it last year, when the court in Harris v. Quinn declared that individual home healthcare providers can’t be compelled to pay union dues or fees, but the unions filed numerous lawsuit against the Freedom Foundation seeking to prevent their “members” from learning about their rights.

But if dragging their feet on a two-year-old Supreme Court ruling seems brazen, how about still ignoring the federal Civil Rights Act more than 50 years after its passage?

Under the law, public employees can object on religious grounds to having their mandatory dues money spent on causes they don’t support. The unions are required to honor the employee’s wishes and find a less offensive charity to which their dues can be donated.

But not without first doing everything it can to resist and intimidate the employee.

Andrea Henry was just such a person – until the Freedom Foundation stepped in.

Employed at a nonprofit healthcare organization, Andrea’s workplace was unionized by SEIU 775 several years ago. When she began her job, she understood union membership to be a requirement of the job, and thus signed a membership card and paid regular monthly dues.

But she was never comfortable with the arrangement, and her discomfort turned to horror this past year when she discovered a portion of her dues was being donated to Planned Parenthood – whose values and actions were deeply offensive to her Christian principles.

Andrea attempted to declare her status as a religious objector, but the union make the process unreasonably complicated – even demanding she submit a biographical profile of her pastor.

Fed up, she and her husband came to the Freedom Foundation for help and, within weeks, the union dropped its resistance and recognized Andrea’s civil rights.