The Supreme Court dealt a limited setback to the union movement Monday, ruling that personal home-care employees cannot be forced to pay dues to a union. But it refused an invitation to extend the ruling to all public employees.
In a 5-4 ruling written Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., the court said home healthcare assistants, some of whom care for their disabled children at home, have a constitutional right not to support a union they oppose.
The decision is a victory for the National Right to Work Foundation, which took up the cause of several mothers who objected to paying union fees. It is a defeat for the Service Employees International Union and Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn.
Beginning in 2003, Illinois officials agreed to deem these home-care workers "public employees" because they are paid with Medicaid funds to care for disabled adults. That cleared the way for the SEIU to organize them into a union.
Union officials say they have won higher wages and better benefits for 20,000 of these home-care assistants in Illinois. But anti-union lawyers sued the state, arguing the private assistants are not truly public employees and should not be compelled to pay fees to a union.
In keeping its ruling narrow, the high court refrained from dealing an even greater setback to unions. Some had urged the court to rule that all public employees have a right to opt out of paying union dues, reversing its 1977 ruling that upheld mandatory union fees.
By law, public employees cannot be required to join a union and pay full dues as members. These dues may pay for lobbying and political spending.
But since 1977, the high court had upheld "fair share" fees, which require all the employees to pay a lesser amount to cover the cost of collective bargaining.
In recent years, however, more conservative justices raised doubts about whether the practice violated the 1st Amendment. They argued that the government usually cannot force individuals to support private groups, yet the mandatory fees forced some government employees to support organizations they opposed.
"If we accepted Illinois' argument, we would approve an unprecedented violation of the bedrock principle that, except perhaps in the rarest of circumstances, no person in this country may be compelled to subsidize speech by a third party that he or she does not wish to support," Alito wrote for himself and the court's four other most conservative justices. That, he said, is prohibited by the 1st Amendment.
In the Illinois case, known as Harris vs. Quinn, the National Right to Work Foundation urged the justices to either limit who can be forced to support a union or to strike down mandatory fees entirely.
A broad ruling casting doubt on mandatory fees could have had a significant effect in Democratic-leaning states, which authorize unions and mandatory fees. These so-called blue states are in the Northeast, the upper Midwest and on the West Coast. Most of the Republican-leaning red states in the South and the Great Plains have "right to work" laws that allow employees to opt out of unions.
In his opinion, Alito repeatedly called into question the validity of the court's 1977 ruling allowing the collection of fees from non-union public employees, saying it was based on a "questionable foundation." But he stopped short of overruling it.
Justice Elena Kagan, joined by the court's three other liberals, welcomed that part of the majority's restraint, while at the same time dissenting from the holding on the Illinois workers.
"Today's majority cannot resist taking potshots at [the 1977 ruling in Abood vs. Detroit Board of Education], but it ignores the petitioners' invitation to depart from principles of stare decisis [honoring precedent]. That is to the good -- or at least better than it might be. The Abood rule is deeply entrenched, and is the foundation for not tens or hundreds, but thousands of contracts between unions and governments across the nation. Our precedent about precedent, fairly understood and applied, makes it impossible for this court to reverse that decision."
In its lawsuit, the right-to-work attorneys portrayed the arrangement in Illinois as a questionable deal between union officials and state Democrats led by former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich in 2003. Quinn became the defendant as the lawsuit moved forward.
For more news of the Supreme Court, follow me on Twitter @DavidGSavage
June 30, 7:49 a.m.: This post has been updated with additional details and background.
This story was orginally posted at 6:45 a.m.
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