The Freedom Foundation attorneys on Wednesday filed a lawsuit to protect the First Amendment rights of seven workers from five different Oregon government agencies. Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) first covered the suit in an article.
These state, county and city employees are not union members. They objected to membership with Oregon AFSCME, Council 75, because they disagree with the causes the union supports.
Nonetheless, each is still forced to pay agency fees in lieu of dues.
These fees are nearly the same amount as regular dues. AFSCME 75 slightly discounts the dues to offset the amount that AFSCME 75 alleges to spend on political and ideological purposes and then relabels the charge as agency fees.
However, to these seven workers, the fact that a portion of their wages are automatically sent to an organization that lobbies and advocates for causes that contradict their values is unacceptable.
No one should be forced to pay money to an organization with opposing views. AFSCME 75 is violating the First Amendment rights of these workers.
One of the workers has paid these forced agency fees for 13 years.
The complaint, which can be found here, asserts, “Money is fungible, so when the Plaintiffs are forced to subsidize AFSCME 75’s collective-bargaining activities, they are freeing up resources that AFSCME 75 may then spend on political and ideological activities.”
In the next week, the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to rule on Janus v. AFSCME, a case that could free all public-sector employees across the nation from mandatory agency fees. Janus could overturn an antiquated decision from 1977, Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, that approved this unacceptable practice. Abood paved the way for worker freedom by allowing an opt-out system for public employees who object to their union’s political and ideological activities. However, Abood stopped short of complete freedom by requiring objecting public employees to pay agency fees.
The Abood compromise has been the subject of criticism in recent Supreme Court decisions such as Knox v. SEIU (2012), in which the ruling noted that it might “(exceed) the limit of what the First Amendment can tolerate.”
In 2014, the Supreme Court maintained in Harris v. Quinn, that Abood was “…questionable on several grounds,” and that the Abood court “seriously erred” and “fundamentally misunderstood” the court’s earlier decisions.
Abood relied on decisions pertaining to the private sector instead of acknowledging that all the activities of a public-sector union are inherently political in nature.
This new lawsuit, Cook v. AFSCME, may bring long-awaited freedom to these seven workers by allowing them to disassociate themselves from the opposite values of Oregon AFSCME 75 and to be reimbursed for the money that was wrongfully withheld from their paychecks.
Perhaps these workers will no longer have to support conflicting beliefs as a condition for keeping their jobs.
