If a cell phone company bills you for services you never agreed to, you know what to do: stop payment and demand a refund. If the company won’t pay up, you can sue. Depending on your state’s consumer protection laws, you might even be entitled to additional damages.

California has some of the strongest consumer protection laws in the country. But while those laws may protect the average consumer against shady business practices, the state’s legal system has proven far more protective of public-sector labor unions, even when those unions are multimillion-dollar organizations engaging in the same types of misconduct.

The practices that unions have perpetrated against California’s public employees include forging union dues authorizations, deducting union dues from employees’ wages without any form of consent – real or fabricated, ignoring requests to opt out for months or even years, tricking employees into signing up for union membership and dues deductions, refusing to disclose the cost of union dues, and using confusing language and fine print to obscure the fact that union membership may come with a years-long financial commitment that is nearly impossible to escape.

The Freedom Foundation sued under California’s unfair business practices laws on behalf of employees allegedly harmed by these and other deceptive practices.

But the California courts concluded that consumer protection claims arising from these disputes fall within the exclusive jurisdiction of the California Public Employment Relations Board (PERB), the state agency that oversees public-sector labor disputes. (Those decisions are on appeal, Marsh et al. v. SEIU Local 2015, No. F090824 (Cal. Ct. App., 5th Dist.); Kendrick et al. v. United Domestic Workers, No. C106403 (Cal. Ct. App., 3d Dist.))

So, the Freedom Foundation’s legal team pivoted and filed unfair labor practice charges with PERB.

But PERB’s Office of the General Counsel determined that the Board lacked jurisdiction to decide whether a union violated state labor law when it deducted dues from an employee who had not consented. That decision, which is currently on appeal, raises a troubling question: if the courts enforcing consumer protection laws defer to PERB, but PERB refuses to exercise jurisdiction, where can state employees turn?

Until the appeals are resolved, state employees who have had money taken from their paychecks without permission have nowhere to turn to enforce their rights under state law. From start to finish, California’s public-sector labor relations system appears designed to protect unions’ bottom lines, not the workers those unions are supposed to represent.

So much for solidarity.