Michigan Education Association Loses Member Opt Out Case—Promises Appeal

IN OCTOBER, A year after his state had adopted a right-to-work law, Michigan Education Association President Steve Cook announced that his union had retained 99 percent of its members.

That was a surprise. Right-to-work laws are associated with unions losing members. That is the not-so-secret reason why many businesses and conservative groups favor them and why Big Labor and liberals oppose them.

“After the other side set up websites, held seminars and town halls, and sent tens of thousands of emails directly to members, 99 percent of the MEA membership said, ‘No, thank you,’ ” Cook said.

What he didn’t say was that eight teachers had filed suit with the Michigan Employment Relations Commission accusing the union of refusing to let them quit. They had reportedly failed to file their decisions to opt out during August, the only month the union accepted them.

“Funny [MEA] should make it August, since we are not in school at the time,” high school teacher and coach William “Ray” Arthur said.

When Arthur submitted his withdrawal notice late, he was informed that he not only owed another year’s worth of dues, but that the union would send a collection agency after him if he didn’t pay. He then phoned MEA to demand to know why he wasn’t informed of this beforehand.

“They said they were not legally required to tell us about [it],” Arthur said.

In an email to the Washington Examiner last year, then-spokesman Doug Pratt explained: “MEA believes in the sanctity of contracts — whether they are with a school district or an individual — and the democratic process.”

In a Michigan Senate hearing in December 2013, Pratt stated bluntly: “Why would any membership organization seek to tell someone how to get out?”

In March 2014, MEA backed down and dropped its objections to letting Arthur and Miriam Chanski quit. Another teacher dropped the case. The cases of five others remained unresolved, until recently.

The Michigan Education Association last week lost a case regarding the one-month window when union members can drop out. A judge ruled that members should be allowed to quit throughout the year.

After a court ruling last week interpreting the state’s right-to-work provisions, Michigan’s largest teachers’ union will have to change its member-retention tactics.

Administrative law judge Julia Stern sided with seven teachers who challenged the August-only opt-out rule,  finding that it violated a 2012 amendment to the state’s public employment law stipulating that payment of union dues cannot be a requirement of employment. The ruling must be approved by the state’s Republican-controlled Employment Relations Commission.

While Stern said she understood MEA’s reasoning for the opt-out window—in particular, the union’s need for a stable membership count for budgeting purposes—she held that the policy could not be maintained under the state’s new right-to-work rules.

The Mackinac Center Legal Foundation, which brought the challenge on behalf of the teachers, cheered the decision.

“Judge Stern’s ruling goes along with our belief that teachers are professionals and not piggy banks for the MEA,” Patrick Wright, director of the foundation, told The Associated Press.

MEA did score some small victories in the case: Stern ruled that the union did not violate state law by sending collection letters for unpaid dues and that the union was not legally required to publicize the new rules.

The union said it plans to appeal and held out hope that the commission would overturn the decision. It also was optimistic about Stern’s recognition of the organizational need for a membership window.

“There are numerous reasons why the August window makes the MEA a more efficient organization and advocate for its membership as a whole, and [Stern] agreed with the MEA’s rationale for the window,” MEA General Counsel Michael Shoudy said in a statement.

The ruling comes at a time when MEA is under significant political pressure, as state leadership has become less friendly to unions in recent years.

Beyond the right-to-work law, a separate law was passed last year that blocked the MEA from taking teacher dues directly out of paychecks. While roughly 8,000 members stopped paying as a result of the change, MEA said last month that many of those who had stopped paying dues eventually began paying again.

In the weeks before the court decision, union opponents launched a campaign to convince members to leave the association during August. Roughly 5,000 of the 110,000 members quit—an number that MEA President Steven Cook saw as a victory.

“Despite a relentless campaign by outside forces determined to discredit and destroy the MEA, more than 95 percent of our members stayed,” Cook said in a statement.

4 Lawsuits That Could Inflict More Damage on Unions After Harris v. Quinn

IN JULY 2014, the Supreme Court’s conservative justices on Monday defied some expectations by not decimating public-employee labor unions via their ruling in Harris v. Quinn. Given the opportunity to issue a sprawling decision that would overturn decades of precedent, and in the process kneecap the basic model of public-employee unionism, the five justices, led by Samuel Alito, instead issued a narrower decision. They ruled that home health care workers in Illinois are not full-fledged public workers and thus cannot be required to pay so-called fair-share fees to unions—money that goes toward the cost of union representation for all workers in a particular workplace.

But we may be back in this same situation a year from now, with the Supreme Court holding the fate of public-employee unions in its hands. That’s because there are a handful of ongoing lawsuits in courts around the country that pose similar challenges to unions as Harris did and that could end up before the Supreme Court. It’s possible that one of these cases could do further damage to the labor movement—with the potential to wipe out the precedent set in 1977’s Abood v. Detroit Board of Education decision. (In Abood, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of public-employee unions collecting fair-share fees from nonmembers to pay the costs of collective bargaining.)

If you’re looking for a common thread between these challenges, it’s the National Right-to-Work Legal Foundation, the driving force behind many anti-union suits around the country. The foundation represented the plaintiffs in Harris v. Quinn, and it has provided legal help in two of the following cases.

Here’s a snapshot of four cases that could be the next Harris:

D’Agostino v. Patrick: A group of home child care workers in Massachusetts filed suit after the state passed a law designating the SEIU as the exclusive union for those workers. Similar to the Illinois home care workers who brought the Harris suit, the Massachusetts workers claim their rights are being infringed on by being represented by SEIU, meaning union members and nonmembers pay dues in exchange for the benefits that come with union representation. This case is in the Federal District Court of Massachusetts.

Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association: A group of public school teachers in California claim that the requirement that they pay fair-share dues to the California Teachers Association infringes on their First Amendment rights. Their suit also seeks to ban the “opt-out” model of automatic dues deductions, in which teachers who pay dues must opt out to keep their money from funding union political activity. Instead, the plaintiffs want teachers to opt in to fund that political work. This case is with the US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Parrish v. Dayton: After Minnesota Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton signed a bill in May 2013 allowing the state’s child care providers to vote to unionize, opponents filed a suit similar to Harris to halt the new law. The suit was on hold pending the outcome of the Harris case. The plaintiffs hailed the Supreme Court’s decision in Harris, and their lawyers now expect movement in Parrish.

Hamidi v. SEIU Local 1000: This suit targets the part of California law that allows public-employee unions to use the opt-out model for dues paying, as described above. If Hamidi, who works for the state’s Franchise Tax Board, succeeds, his suit could take a bite out of Abood, which in part upheld the practice of opt-out clauses. Hamidi’s case is currently in California district court.—Source, Mother Jones