Title: Paycheck Protection: Court Upholds Michigan Law
Abstract: Does forbidding public schools from collecting union dues through deductions violate unions' rights to freedom of speech under the First Amendment? Michigan's teachers unions believe that it does, but a federal appeals court in Bailey v. Callahan has disagreed. If the decision stands, it could have significant effects, as other states have passed or are considering similar legislation in the face of terrified union opposition. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Unions have long viewed attacks on deduction as an existential threat. In 1978, Robert Chanin, the longtime general counsel for the National Education Association (NEA), said, It is well-recognized that if you take away the mechanism of deduction you won't collect a penny from these people. More recently, Dennis Van Roekel, current president of the NEA, estimated that the loss of deduction would lead to a 30 percent decline in union membership. In 2012, Michigan passed Public Act 53, which prohibited public schools from using their resources, i.e., deductions, to assist unions in collecting membership dues. Unions would have to collect dues on their own. But because the law applied only to schools and not to other public employers, such as police and fire departments, teachers unions argued that it engaged in unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination. Their argument required several steps. Payroll deduction makes it easier to collect union dues, and unions use those dues in part to engage in expressive activity. Collecting dues on their own is more costly and less productive for unions because it is easier for teachers to opt out. Citing Citizens United, the unions argued that the law would make it unconstitutionally burdensome for them to engage in speech and would diminish the amount of speech they could engage in. And by making it more difficult to collect dues for teachers unions but not for other public employees' unions, the law discriminates against their proteachers union viewpoint. Schools' payroll-deduction systems, they argued, are a nonpublic forum that they are entitled to use. A district court judge agreed with the unions and issued an injunction barring the law's enforcement. But a divided Sixth Circuit panel overturned the injunction, ruling that the unions' claims were without merit, and remanded the case. The majority opinion, written by Judge Raymond Kethledge, said that the Supreme Court had held in 2009 that denying use of government payroll mechanisms did not violate free-speech rights of unions. …
Publication Year: 2014
Publication Date: 2014-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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