US Supreme Court loads the scales in favour of employers.

The United States Supreme Court has dealt a huge blow to public sector unions by abolishing their legal right to collect bargaining fees from non-members.

In a 5–4 decision the court overturned a 1977 judgement that had allowed public sector unions to collect fees from non-members when bargaining for higher wages and improved working conditions.

No state requires a worker to involuntarily join a union, as opposed to merely paying bargaining fees which are set as a percentage of membership fees.

To be eligible to collect bargaining fees, unions must be endorsed by a majority of workers in an enterprise.

US Supreme Court judges are appointed by the president with Senate approval. The election of Donald Trump with a Republican Senate majority has placed anti-union judges in the majority.

They ruled that requiring non-members to pay their “fair share” was inconsistent with the US constitution’s First Amendment right to free speech.

In a dissenting opinion, justice Elena Kagan warned the decision “will have large-scale consequences. Public employee unions will lose a secure source of financial support”.

She said the decision was the culmination of a six-year campaign to overturn legal precedent.

The closely watched case – Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees –will impact public sector employees in 22 states and could permanently weaken public unions.

The case was brought by Mark Janus, an Illinois state government employee who is represented by the AFSCME union.

Although he is not a union member, 78 per cent of full union dues are deducted from his wages to pay for the Union’s work in bargaining on his behalf.

Janus argued the arrangement violated his right to free speech as unions enter into collective bargaining agreements with the government and all of their activity should be seen as political.

A “perverse ruling”

Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel prize-winning economist and Columbia University professor, described the ruling as “perverse”.

“In a country already suffering from a massive imbalance between employers and workers, the court has loaded the scale even further in favor of the former,” he said.

“Selfish workers will now be able to free ride on their colleagues’ efforts to bargain for improved working conditions and higher pay; and if there are enough of such workers, unions will be further weakened for lack of funds.”

Stiglitz pointed out that the court earlier decided that the First Amendment permits corporations to make unlimited contributions to political campaigns.

“So, in the eyes of the court’s conservatives, corporations may support views that run contrary to a majority of their shareholders and workers – who had no say in the matter – but unions may not express views that are opposed by even a single dues-payer,” he said.

The court had become “merely another instrument for advancing an extreme right-wing agenda.”

Cornell Law School’s Stewart Schwab, a leading scholar in employment law, described the court judgement as “simply amazing”.

Professor Schwab said while some workers may disagree with the union’s goals, many others support the union’s aims of higher wages and better benefits but still hope to “free-ride” by having someone else pay the union fees.

“All taxpayers can sympathise that the government often uses our money for causes we don’t believe in, but that doesn’t give us a First Amendment right not to pay taxes,” he said.