Sacramento, Calif. (April 2, 2004) — A United States District Court Judge for the Eastern District of California has ruled to allow more than 2,800 California state employees to reclaim money illegally confiscated for politics and other activities by officials from the Professional Engineers in California Government (PECG) union.
After admittedly spending most of its revenues on politics, PECG union officials must now give all non-union engineers a new opportunity to retroactively object and reclaim the portion of their forced dues spent for union activities unrelated to collective bargaining. Additionally, the court ruled that union officials failed to provide an independent audit of the union’s books and records, and must do so immediately.
National Right to Work Foundation attorneys originally filed the class-action suit, Hoirup v. PECG, in March 2002 on behalf of Donald Hoirup, an employee of the California Department of Conservation California Geologic Survey in Sacramento. The U.S. District Court order requires PECG union officials to provide all nonunion workers a notice of their right to object to paying fees equal to membership dues and collect a refund of all past illegally seized dues, with interest, no later than June 21. The amount that each objecting worker will receive will vary according to their length of employment.
“This ruling holds some of California’s government union officials to account for trampling workers’ rights,” said Stefan Gleason, Vice President of the National Right to Work Foundation. “However, as long as the state’s union officials have the government-granted privilege to order workers to ‘pay up or be fired,’ such abuses will inevitably continue.”
The PECG is one of California’s most politically active unions. Union officials have seized compulsory dues from workers and used them to fund ballot initiatives and other political activities. According to the union’s own records, over three-fourths of PECG’s $8.1 million annual budget for the year 2000 was used for political activities.
On April 1, 1999, the newly elected Governor Gray Davis signed the union pact that forced all workers to pay illegally high dues to PECG union officials.
According to the constitutional protections construed by the U.S. Supreme Court in the Foundation-won decisions of Abood v. Detroit Board of Education and Lehnert v. Ferris Faculty Association, union officials may not collect compulsory dues spent on activities unrelated to collective bargaining. Politics, lobbying, public relations, and other non-bargaining activities are non-chargeable to employees who have exercised their right to refrain from formal union membership. Moreover, under the Foundation-won Chicago Teachers v. Hudson decision, union officials must provide an independent audit of the union’s expenditures to all non-union members as a precondition to collecting any compulsory dues.
The National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation is a nonprofit, charitable organization providing free legal aid to employees whose human or civil rights have been violated by compulsory unionism abuses. The Foundation, which can be contacted toll-free at 1-800-336-3600, assists thousands of employees in about 200 cases nationwide per year.
