Foundation attorneys argue IAM scheme violates Supreme Court’s Janus standard by seizing political dues from nonmembers without their consent

Washington, DC (August 17, 2021) – Yesterday, National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation staff attorneys filed the final brief supporting Texas United Airlines employee Arthur Baisley’s petition for writ of certiorari in the United States Supreme Court. He is urging the Court to hear his federal class-action civil rights case contesting a dues arrangement imposed by International Association of Machinists (IAM) union officials. The scheme forces him and his coworkers by default to subsidize union political activities in violation of the First Amendment and Railway Labor Act (RLA).

The policy that Baisley is challenging requires employees who choose not to join the union to opt out of funding the union’s political and ideological activities during a brief annual “window period,” or else have money exacted from their wages for those purposes against their will. Baisley’s Foundation-provided attorneys argue that this violates employee rights under both the 2018 Foundation-won Janus v. AFSCME Supreme Court decision, and the RLA.

The RLA governs labor relations in the rail and airline industries, and protects the right of employees to “join, organize, or assist in organizing” a union of their choice, as well as the right to abstain from all union activities. In Janus, the High Court ruled it violates the First Amendment to force a public-sector employee to pay union fees as a condition of keeping his or her job, citing the fact that all union dues for public employees are inherently political because government union speech is directed towards the government. As part of its ruling, the High Court affirmed that union dues could only be deducted from a public employee’s paycheck with an affirmative waiver of that employee’s right not to pay.

Foundation staff attorneys argue that under both Janus and another Foundation-won Supreme Court decision, Knox v. SEIU, no employee can be charged for union political or ideological expenditures without first giving their affirmative and knowing consent. This is because language from a 1961 case that union lawyers use to prop up “opt out” schemes, like the one foisted by IAM union officials on Baisley and his coworkers, was not only dicta, but was also found flawed by the Supreme Court in Knox.

Foundation attorneys also reiterate in the latest brief that the government is involved in enforcing the RLA and thus First Amendment scrutiny should apply to the IAM bosses’ scheme, stating, “The Court should grant review to make clear that the First Amendment and federal law protect employees regulated under the Railway Labor Act from opt-out regimes—regimes which ‘create[ ] a risk that the fees paid by nonmembers will be used to further political and ideological ends with which they do not agree.’”

Baisley is not a member of the IAM but is still forced to pay some union fees despite being based in the Right to Work state of Texas. The RLA preempts state Right to Work protections which make union membership and all union financial support strictly voluntary. However, under longstanding law, even without Right to Work protections nonmembers cannot, as a condition of keeping their jobs, be required to pay fees for anything beyond the union’s expenses directly related to monopoly bargaining.

Baisley’s petition detailed the convoluted union boss-created process that workers must navigate just to prevent money from being taken from their paychecks in violation of their First Amendment rights. In Baisley’s situation, even though he sent a letter to IAM agents in November 2018 objecting to funding all union political activities, union officials only accepted his objection for 2019, and told Baisley he had to renew his objection to full dues and fees the next year or else be charged full union dues.

Baisley’s lawsuit seeks to strike down the opt-out requirement not only as it is applied to him, but also for his coworkers whose rights are similarly restricted by the IAM’s opt-out policy. Union officials would then be required to get nonmember workers to give affirmative consent to paying for union boss activities beyond the bargaining-related expenses they can legally be required to subsidize under the RLA.

The final brief in Baisley’s case comes as other Foundation-backed lawsuits for employees defending their First Amendment Janus rights seek writs of certiorari from the Supreme Court. This includes cases brought for Chicago and New Jersey public educators which challenge “window periods” that severely limit when they and their fellow educators can exercise their First Amendment right to stop dues deductions for union bosses, sometimes to periods as short as ten days per year. In a California federal court, Foundation staff attorneys are also aiding a University of California Irvine lab assistant in fighting an anti-Janus state law that gives union bosses full control over whether employers can stop sending an employee’s money to the union after that employee exercises his or her Janus rights.

Baisley’s case is expected to be conferenced by the Justices on September 27, after which the Court will announce whether it will be heard.

“Baisley is simply seeking to stop the presumption that he wants his hard-earned money to go to union political ventures that he does not want to prop up. IAM officials’ ‘opt-out’ scheme is quite clearly meant to frustrate employees’ attempts to exercise that basic right and to keep pumping their money into those political activities,” observed National Right to Work Foundation President Mark Mix. “Judging by other pending Foundation litigation, it seems that union officials across the country are not willing to respect this right for either public or private sector workers.”

“Employee support of union political expenditures should come only voluntarily, not through underhanded, complex arrangements designed to trick nonmember workers into funding political activities they oppose,” Mix added.

Labor board agent revealed how individual workers voted in latest example of why in-person, secret-ballot voting better protects workers from retaliation and pressure tactics

Las Vegas, NV (August 10, 2021) – Technicians at a Fox Television Stations, Inc. facility in Las Vegas will get another chance to vote on whether they will remove National Association of Broadcast Employees & Technicians (NABET-CWA) union officials from their workplace.

The rerun election follows a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) agent’s gross mishandling of the first mail-in ballot count. The employee who submitted a worker-backed petition for a vote to remove the union, Victor Morales, received free legal representation from National Right to Work Foundation staff attorneys in challenging the tainted vote count.

Under NLRB policies, workers have the right to vote unwanted union officials out of their workplace, but first must submit a petition demonstrating that at least 30 percent of the workplace desires such a vote. If enough workers are interested, the NLRB will conduct a “decertification election” after which union officials will lose their status as monopoly bargaining agent in the workplace.

Voting in person by secret ballot has been the default way the NLRB conducts all elections, including decertification votes, and has long been recognized as the most secure election method. However, the vote in Morales’ workplace occurred via mail, a method in which balloting is completely unsupervised by the NLRB and each ballot must be returned in an envelope bearing the employee’s name and address.

According to a brief filed by Morales with free Foundation legal aid, an agent of NLRB Region 28 in Phoenix exposed the choices of every voter in Morales’ workplace, an occurrence that would not be possible in a secret-ballot in-person vote. Morales’ brief noted that, as he and other parties observed the vote count via Zoom, the agent read the choice on each ballot immediately after removing it from both its blue interior security envelope and its exterior yellow mailing envelope containing each voter’s name. In doing so, the agent “destroyed ballot secrecy and revealed how every employee voted.” Morales’ brief demanded a rerun election.

NLRB Region 19 in Seattle, which investigated the miscount by NLRB Region 28, agreed that the integrity of the vote had been wholly compromised. Its report noted that the “Board has a longstanding policy of voiding ballots which reveal the identity of the voter.” The report recommended a rerun vote because there is “sufficient evidence to establish that the Board agent did not safeguard the secrecy of the votes cast which raises a reasonable doubt as to the fairness and validity of the election.”

The go-ahead for a new election in Morales’ workplace comes as Foundation staff attorneys are aiding a Los Angeles transportation worker, Nelson Medina, in preventing the NLRB from tossing out his objections to a mail ballot election in his workplace pushed by Teamsters Local 848 union officials. Medina asserts that several of his fellow employees’ ballots weren’t counted due purely to errors by NLRB agents or the US Post Office, and that union lawyers had access to tracking numbers for ballots that were originally considered late, indicating unlawful mail ballot harvesting by union officials.

These two cases are just the latest examples of the inferiority of mail and electronic ballots, both of which are preferred by union organizers who can game the system to the detriment of workers who wish to keep their vote private.

Because balloting in such union-preferred election methods is conducted outside the supervision of the NLRB, union agents can and do employ pressure tactics while the vote is ongoing. Unions often send multiple organizers to make unsolicited visits to workers at their homes shortly after they receive their ballots. The organizers at times actually handle ballots and/or watch how individual workers cast their vote.

These coercive tactics are already employed in “card check” union organizing campaigns, a method which allows union officials to bypass a secret-ballot election entirely and install themselves in a workplace merely by sending agents to collect union authorization cards from workers, also while unmonitored by the NLRB.

The latest NLRB missteps in non-in-person unionization votes have occurred as top Organized Labor officials and their allies in Congress push for the NLRB to promote electronic ballot elections, which would allow union officials to deploy “card check” pressure tactics in the same way as they do with mail ballot votes.

In a recent appropriations bill (H.R. 4502), the House of Representatives recently included a rider requiring the NLRB to create an electronic voting system.

The so-called “PRO-Act,” a bill designed to increase union boss power over workers opposed to union representation, also contains a provision requiring the NLRB to implement an electronic voting system for representation elections, with voting taking place by either internet or telephone.

“Mr. Morales and his coworkers deserve a secure, in-person, election so they can freely choose who will speak for them in the workplace. Foundation staff attorneys will keep fighting for them until they get it,” commented National Right to Work Foundation President Mark Mix. “Union officials favor any voting method that takes away the private, secret-ballot process that allows workers to vote yes or no in unionization elections. Under these voting schemes, union organizers can confront and pressure workers until enough have been intimidated into supporting unionization.”

UPTE officials arbitrarily require photo ID just to stop financial support for unwanted union

Irvine, CA (August 2, 2021) – A University of California Irvine lab assistant has filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the university and the University Professional and Technical Employees (UPTE) union, a Communications Workers of America (CWA) affiliate.

The case, filed with free legal aid from the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, challenges the university’s illegal seizure of union dues money from her paychecks, and its policy allowing union officials to impose a photo ID requirement limiting the right of public employees to cut off dues payments to the union.

Amber Walker’s class-action lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California on July 30. Her Foundation-provided attorneys argue that a California statute that makes public employers completely subservient to union officials on dues issues resulted in both due process and First Amendment violations that occurred due to UPTE officials’ photo ID requirement.

The National Right to Work Foundation won the Janus v. AFSCME case at the U.S. Supreme Court in 2018. The Court declared that forcing public sector workers to fund unions as a condition of employment violates the First Amendment. The Justices also ruled that union dues can only be taken from a public employee with an affirmative and knowing waiver of that employee’s First Amendment right not to pay.

Walker’s lawsuit explains that she sent UPTE union bosses a letter in June 2021 exercising her right to end her union membership and all union dues deductions from her wages. Although Walker submitted this message within a short annual “escape period” that UPTE officials impose to limit when workers can revoke dues deductions, they still rebuffed her request, telling her she needed to mail them a copy of a photo ID to effectuate her revocation. The photo ID requirement, clearly adopted to frustrate workers’ attempts to exercise their constitutional rights, is mentioned nowhere on the dues deduction card Walker had previously signed to initiate dues payments.

The university and UPTE officials have continued to take money from Walker’s wages against her will. It appears they plan to continue to do so for at least another year as the UPTE’s arbitrary and short annual “window period” elapsed by the time UPTE officials notified Walker that her attempt to stop dues was rejected for lack of photo ID. The university is required to defer to UPTE’s dictates under the California statute that gives unions total control over public employees’ dues deductions.

Foundation staff attorneys state in Walker’s complaint that, because of the California statute, UPTE officials were able to trample Walker’s desire to keep her own money and were allowed to infringe on her First Amendment Janus rights, explaining that “The University deprives Walker and similarly situated employees of their liberty and property interests without due process of law by granting a self-interested and biased party, UPTE, control over whether the University takes monies for union speech from employees’ wages.”

Walker seeks refunds of the dues taken from her and other university workers under UPTE’s photo ID scheme. She also seeks to stop the State of California from enforcing its state law outsourcing the process for stopping and starting union dues deductions to self-interested union officials.

Meanwhile, Foundation staff attorneys are urging the Supreme Court of the United States to take up two class-action cases defending public sector employees’ First Amendment Janus rights from union boss-created “escape periods” that restrict the time in which public employees can stop financial support of an unwanted union. One of these cases, brought for Chicago Public Schools educators, challenges an “escape period” that limits the exercise of this right to one month per year, while the other brought for New Jersey educators contests a similar period that lasts only ten days per year.

“California CWA union bosses clearly value illegally filling their coffers with Ms. Walker’s money over respecting her First Amendment and due process rights. They created this photo ID requirement out of thin air to block workers from exercising their Janus rights, safe in the knowledge that California’s union dues policies would stifle any chance a public worker has of getting his or her employer to stop seizing dues money for the union,” commented National Right to Work Foundation President Mark Mix. “By giving union bosses total control over how and when workers can exercise their First Amendment Janus right to stop dues payments, California is allowing the fox to guard the henhouse to the detriment of public employees’ constitutional rights.”

Union must back down after attempting to fine worker who resigned to take a different job, union must inform other workers

Colorado Springs, CO (July 30, 2021) – Following an investigation by National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) officials, a formal settlement has now forced International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail, and Transportation Workers (SMART) Local 9 union officials to inform workers about their right to resign their union memberships, and that it will not ignore such resignations or mete out internal union discipline on workers who resign.

The settlement comes after Colorado Springs metal worker Russell Chacon filed an unfair labor practice charge at Region 27 of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in Denver in May after he received a message from Sheet Metal union bosses imposing $21,252 in union disciplinary fines on him. The fines were imposed despite the fact that Chacon had resigned his union membership and left a job at a contractor under Local 9’s power several months earlier to work at a Pueblo facility free from union control. Chacon received free legal representation from National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation staff attorneys.

Although Sheet Metal union bosses informally rescinded their fine demands soon after Chacon filed his charge, NLRB Region 27 continued to investigate Chacon’s charge that union officials had instigated the discipline specifically in retaliation for his leaving the union. Decades-old federal law prohibits union officials from forcing internal union discipline on workers who have resigned union membership, and from restricting the exercise of that basic right to refrain.

The NLRB found merit in Chacon’s claims of retaliation earlier this month, forcing union officials to settle in order to avoid NLRB prosecution.

Chacon used to work for Colorado Sheet Metal, a Colorado Springs-based contractor whose employees are under the monopoly bargaining power of the Sheet Metal Local 9 union. According to his unfair labor practice charge, he sent a letter to Local 9 union officials resigning his union membership in November 2020 so he could work for Rocky Mechanical, a Pueblo-based firm outside Local 9’s control. The union fine demand, which came several months after his change in jobs, demanded Chacon fork over $21,252 to cover the alleged union “loss of funds” for a period through May 31, which included days that Chacon had not even worked yet.

The settlement requires Sheet Metal union officials to post a notice at the union office stating that they “will not fail to inform or misinform you about the proper process for resigning your membership,” “will not fail to give effect to resignations of membership from the Union,” and “will not restrain and coerce you by instituting and prosecuting disciplinary proceedings and levying fines after failing to give effect to resignations.” The notice also confirms that Chacon is no longer subject to the fine demands.

“As the conclusion of this case shows, Sheet Metal union officials were caught red-handed violating workers’ most basic right to refrain from associating with an organization they don’t want to be part of,” commented National Right to Work Foundation President Mark Mix. “Although we are pleased that Mr. Chacon is no longer saddled with an outrageous fine demand, unfortunately other Colorado workers can still be forced to pay dues to these thuggish union bosses because The Centennial State lacks a Right to Work law.”

Mix continued, “Right to Work protections ensure that all union financial support is strictly voluntary, and no worker can be fired just for refusal to pay dues to unwanted union bosses.”

Series of successful worker-led decertifications of Teamsters union bosses nationwide follow federal labor board rule change simplifying process

Chicago, IL (July 26, 2021) – Maintenance workers at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago have successfully removed Teamsters Local 743 union officials from their workplace, following a vote in which more than 70% of those who cast ballots voted to free themselves from the Teamsters’ monopoly bargaining power. The election was held after worker Tim Mangia submitted a petition to National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) Region 13 in Chicago demonstrating sufficient support among his coworkers for a decertification vote.

Mangia received free legal aid in filing the petition from a National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation staff attorney. The successful ouster is the latest in a string of successful worker-led decertifications of Teamsters officials across the country. Just last month, Frito-Lay salesmen voted Teamsters Local 657 officials out of their monopoly bargaining status in Del Rio, TX, and Eagle Pass, TX, a removal which followed Santa Maria, CA Allied Central Coast Distributing delivery drivers’ April dethroning of Teamsters Local 986 bosses. The workers who submitted petitions requesting decertification votes in each of these cases received legal help from Foundation staff attorneys.

Mangia and his coworkers are employed by Jones Lang Lasalle Americas, Inc. Mangia gathered the necessary signatures from his coworkers and on May 17, 2021 submitted the petition requesting that NLRB Region 13 supervise a secret ballot vote to remove the union. The ballots were counted on July 8 and by July 16 NLRB Region 13 confirmed that the workers had voted 25-8 to eject Teamsters bosses from their workplace.

For almost a year workers have been enjoying an easier pathway to exercising their right to remove unwanted union officials. The NLRB in Washington, DC, in July 2020 enacted new rules governing decertification elections which, drawing from comments Foundation attorneys submitted to the agency earlier that year, now forbid union bosses from indefinitely stalling worker-requested votes based on “blocking charges.” Those charges are allegations against an employer that are often unproven and unrelated to workers’ desire to oust union officials.

In Mangia’s case, the new rules may have prevented union officials from submitting “blocking charges,” as filing them would have neither delayed the election nor stopped the results of the vote from being released.

Had the effort by Mangia and his colleagues to oust Teamsters Local 743 officials been blocked, every full-time employee in Mangia’s workplace would have been forced to continue to suffer under union boss monopoly power. Additionally, the employees would have been forced to pay money from their wages to fund the union boss hierarchy because Illinois lacks Right to Work protections for its workers.

Right to Work protections ensure that no worker can be required to join or pay dues to a union as a condition of keeping his or her job. In a non-Right to Work state like Illinois, workers who choose not to affiliate with a union can still be forced to pay at least a portion of union dues as a condition of employment.

“Although Foundation-backed NLRB rule changes eliminated some of the barriers faced by Mr. Mangia and his coworkers in removing the Teamsters union from their workplace, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that it is wrong for so-called union ‘representation’ to be imposed on even one worker who doesn’t want it,” observed National Right to Work Foundation President Mark Mix. “States like Illinois which lack Right to Work protections compound the injustice of letting union officials force workers under union representation against their will by also empowering union bosses to threaten workers to pay union dues or else be fired.”

“We will continue to work towards a day when unions can neither impose their so-called ‘representation’ on individual workers against their will, nor force them to fund union activities,” Mix added.

New settlement requires union bosses to provide workers information on how union is spending their money

Buffalo, NY (July 13, 2021) – With free legal representation from National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation staff attorneys, Lockport, NY-based Student Transportation of America school bus driver Cynthia Roszman has won a settlement in her case charging the Teamsters Local 449 union with failing to provide information about how worker dues are spent.

As part of the settlement, Teamsters union officials must provide Roszman and her coworkers who have refrained from formal union membership sufficient information to decide whether to challenge the union’s dues calculation for nonmembers.

National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) Region 3 in Buffalo is enforcing the settlement. Roszman, who resigned her union membership in May 2018, first hit Teamsters bosses with federal charges in September of that same year, asserting that they had not provided her with an independently-verified breakdown of the union’s expenditures and accompanying information about the process for disputing union officials’ calculation of the reduced dues rate for nonmembers.

The NLRB ruled in 1995 that under the 1988 Foundation-won CWA v. Beck case private sector union officials must provide nonmember employees with this information. Beck mandates that private sector union bosses cannot, as a job condition, force workers who have abstained from union membership to pay dues for anything beyond the union’s core representational activities.

In states that have Right to Work protections for their employees, union membership and financial support are completely voluntary and union bosses cannot force workers to pay any portion of dues as a condition of keeping a job. Even though New York lacks such protections, union bosses still must follow the requirements of Beck to justify their forced dues demands.

To avoid prosecution, Teamsters Local 449 officials initially entered into a settlement in the case in January 2019. They agreed to only deduct from Roszman the nonmember dues rate based on the Teamsters national union’s financials, so they could rely on the national union’s breakdown as opposed to providing one themselves. However, after about a year union bosses reneged on this agreement and resumed demanding Roszman pay Local 449’s nonmember rate, yet refused to give her the legally-mandated financial breakdown and information for challenging that rate.

The latest Foundation-won settlement now compels Teamsters Local 449 officials to give Roszman and her coworkers who have decided not to associate with the union “information that is relevant and sufficient to enable the objector to determine whether to challenge the calculation” of the union’s dues amount for nonmembers. Union officials must also post a notice at Roszman’s workplace informing employees of the settlement.

“Although this favorable outcome for Ms. Roszman is good news, no workers should have to battle union bosses for years just to get basic information on how the union is spending their money, and on how they can contest what union officials force them to contribute just to keep their jobs,” commented National Right to Work Foundation President Mark Mix. “All American workers deserve the protection of a national Right to Work law, which would ensure that no worker could legally be forced to pay dues or fees to a union boss just to get or keep a job.”

Teamsters officials pushed to have union representation vote by mail as opposed to in-person, worker presents evidence of union using system to illegally solicit ballots

Los Angeles, CA (July 2, 2021) – Nelson Medina, an employee at transportation company Savage Services’ Wilmington, CA, facility, has just filed a Request for Review to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in Washington, DC. He is demanding the Board review an NLRB Regional Director’s discarding of his objections to a mail ballot election pushed by Teamsters Local 848 union officials. This vote resulted in the Teamsters gaining monopoly bargaining power in Medina’s workplace, despite significant evidence that union officials manipulated the less-secure nature of mail elections to illegally solicit ballots, and despite evidence of other voter disenfranchisement that occurred due to flaws in the process.

Medina, who is represented for free by National Right to Work Foundation staff attorneys, in his brief reiterates evidence that at least 12 of his fellow employees never had their votes counted purely due to errors by the US Post Office and the NLRB regional office. He also details that a union lawyer had “access to the tracking numbers for two of the ballots” which were originally considered late, indicating unlawful vote harvesting by union officials.

Medina seeks to have the NLRB in Washington overturn the NLRB Regional Director’s decision and order a hearing on voter disenfranchisement. His brief argues that, if the Board orders such a hearing and “ultimately finds merit to some, but not all of these objections, there is a chance that the ballot solicitation objections” involve enough ballots to invalidate the mail election win that Teamsters officials claim they have. He also demands that a rerun vote be administered for him and his coworkers.

On the issue of voter disenfranchisement, Medina’s brief states: “the evidence will show that the timing of the mail ballot election during the pandemic and the U.S. Presidential election” led to a substantial number of votes not being counted. The circumstances surrounding the election also didn’t meet any of the criteria the NLRB set forth in its Aspirus Keweenaw standard for administering a mail vote, the Request for Review argues. The NLRB generally prefers the security of in-person elections to mail ballot ones.

With regard to ballot solicitation, Medina’s brief contends that the Teamsters lawyer’s possession of the tracking numbers of the untimely ballots “is highly suspect and creates an inference that the Union was involved in or assisted with the mailing of those two ballots,” and that the Regional Director’s decision to reject these concerns and those about voter disenfranchisement without a hearing to evaluate the issues is impossible to justify.

Earlier in 2021, Foundation staff attorneys filed an amicus brief for Medina in Professional Transportation, another NLRB case in which workers asserted that union officials were soliciting and collecting ballots illegally. That brief pointed out that the under the NLRB’s Fessler precedent “unions faced with mail ballot elections are likely to engage in voter solicitation knowing that…they are unlikely to ever get caught,” even though employers would almost certainly be punished for attempting the same thing.

“Union bosses prefer mail ballots for unionization elections over in-person NLRB-monitored secret ballot votes for the same reason Big Labor advocates for ‘card check’ unionization: without direct NLRB oversight it is easier for union agents to apply pressure tactics, threats, and other coercive measures,” commented National Right to Work Foundation President Mark Mix. “Mr. Medina and his coworkers deserve a secure in-person election so they can freely choose who will speak for them in the workplace, and Foundation staff attorneys will keep fighting for them until they get it.”

Multiple cases headed to High Court seeking ruling against arrangements that violate workers’ rights under 2018 Janus v. AFSCME Supreme Court decision

Washington, DC (June 21, 2021) – Staff attorneys from the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation have just submitted petitions for writ of certiorari in two class-action civil rights cases seeking to enforce workers’ First Amendment rights. In both cases public educators are challenging union boss-created restrictions on their First Amendment right to refrain from funding unwanted union hierarchies in their workplaces.

One petition was filed for Chicago Public Schools educators Joanne Troesch and Ifeoma Nkemdi, whose lawsuit against the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) and the Chicago Board of Education challenges a union boss-created “escape period” scheme that blocks workers from exercising their right to terminate dues deductions from their paychecks outside the month of August.

The second petition was filed in a lawsuit brought by New Jersey teachers Susan Fischer and Jeanette Speck, who are suing the New Jersey Education Association (NJEA) union for enforcing a similar annual window that restricts employees in the exercise of their Janus rights to just 10 days annually, less than 3% of the year.

Both lawsuits argue that these union dues “escape periods” run afoul of the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Janus v. AFSCME, which was won by Foundation staff attorneys in 2018. In Janus, the court ruled that no public worker can be forced to pay union dues or fees as a condition of keeping his or her job. The Court further held that union bosses contravene the First Amendment if they seize any money from an employee’s paycheck without an affirmative consent and a knowing waiver of that employee’s First Amendment rights.

Fischer and Speck, who both work in Ocean Township, NJ, attempted to exercise their Janus rights in July 2018, just a month after the High Court handed down the Janus decision. But Township officials told the teachers they could only stop payments and withdraw their memberships during an annual 10-day window. Unbeknownst to them, union partisans in the New Jersey legislature had actually established that “escape period” by law in May 2018 in an apparent attempt to defang the pending Janus decision.

Fischer and Speck’s suit argues that because the Janus ruling gave public employees the First Amendment right not to financially support union activities, the New Jersey law is unconstitutional and must be nixed. In addition to eliminating the “escape period” scheme, they seek a refund of membership dues for themselves and all other public employees who were blocked by NJEA officials from stopping dues deductions following Janus.

Nkemdi and Troesch’s original lawsuit explains that both educators “did not know they had a constitutional right not to financially support” the union hierarchy until the fall of 2019, when they discovered their Janus rights while looking for information on how to continue working during a strike that CTU bosses ordered that October. They sent letters the same month to CTU officials to exercise their Janus right to resign union membership and cut off all dues deductions.

Both educators received no response until November of that year, when CTU officials confirmed receipt of the letters but said that they would continue to seize dues from the teachers’ paychecks “until September 1, 2020,” as per the union’s “escape period” scheme. Troesch and Nkemdi demanded in their lawsuit that CTU union officials and the Board of Education stop enforcing the “escape period,” notify all bargaining unit employees that they can end dues deductions any time, and permit bargaining unit employees to claim back dues that were already seized without their consent.

“‘Escape periods’ like those forced on Troesch, Nkemdi, Fischer, and Speck serve no purpose other than to keep the hard-earned cash of public servants who oppose union officials’ so-called ‘representation’ flowing into union coffers even after those employees have clearly exercised their First Amendment right to object to such payments,” commented National Right to Work Foundation President Mark Mix. “With opposition to these schemes growing among public employees, the Supreme Court must quickly take up this issue and clarify that Janus does not permit union bosses to profit from curtailing workers’ constitutional rights.”

NLRB still investigating union officials for fine issued after worker exercised right to end union membership and began working for firm outside union’s control

Colorado Springs, CO (June 11, 2021) – With free legal aid from National Right to Work Foundation staff attorneys, Colorado Springs metal worker Russell Chacon has forced International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail, and Transportation Workers (SMART) Local 9 union officials to abandon their illegal demands against him for tens of thousands of dollars in fines.

Chacon filed an unfair labor practice charge at Region 27 of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in Denver last month after he received a message from SMART union bosses imposing $21,252 in union disciplinary fines on him. The demand came despite the fact that Chacon had resigned his union membership and left a job at a contractor under SMART Local 9’s power several months earlier to work at a Pueblo facility free from union control.

Now, just weeks after the charge was filed, SMART union bosses have rescinded their fine demands. However, an NLRB investigation is ongoing into SMART union officials’ actions surrounding the ruinous fine they attempted to impose against Chacon.

SMART agents claimed in correspondence with Chacon that the fine was for an alleged “loss of funds” supposedly resulting from his working for an employer outside SMART’s influence. Decades-old federal law prohibits union officials from forcing internal union discipline on workers who have exercised their right to refrain from union membership, and from restricting the exercise of that basic right.

Chacon used to work for Colorado Sheet Metal, a Colorado Springs-based contractor whose employees are under the monopoly bargaining power of the SMART Local 9 union. According to his unfair labor practice charge, he sent a letter to SMART union officials resigning his union membership in November 2020, and soon after went to work for Rocky Mechanical, a Pueblo-based firm outside the SMART union’s control.

The union fine demand, which came several months after his change in jobs, ordered Chacon to fork over money to cover the alleged union “loss of funds” for a period through May 31, which at that time included days that Chacon had not even worked yet.

“While we are pleased that Mr. Chacon no longer faces this outrageous and unlawful fine, rank-and-file workers should not have to file federal charges just to have rights respected,” commented National Right to Work Foundation President Mark Mix. “Colorado still lacks Right to Work protections for its private sector workers to ensure that no employee is forced to pay tribute to union bosses just to get or keep a job, including union officials who blatantly ignore decades of longstanding law to retaliate against workers seeking not to associate with a labor union.”