The Patriot Post® · SCOTUS Considers Unions and Rights

The Supreme Court heard arguments last week in Harris v. Quinn, a case in which the issue is whether a state may, consistent with the First and Fourteenth Amendments, compel personal care providers to accept and financially support a private organization, a union, as their exclusive representative to petition the state for greater reimbursements from its Medicaid programs.

In 2003, then-Illinois Democrat Gov. Rod Blagojevich (now a convicted felon) signed an executive order making the Service Employees International Union the exclusive bargaining agent for home-care workers. The state’s current governor, Democrat Pat Quinn, signed a second order in 2009. The targeted workers are often self-employed and have no relation to the state other than Illinois using Medicaid to subsidize home care to the disabled. Illinois, invoking a variant of the Golden Rule (“He who has the gold makes the rules”), declared these workers to be state employees, providing SEIU new dues-paying members. We’re sure that it’s unrelated, but SEIU contributed about $1.8 million to Blagojevich’s two campaigns for governor, in 2002 and 2006, and was his top contributor in the second election.

Plaintiff Pamela Harris cares at home for her severely disabled son. She and seven others are challenging the Illinois rule as infringing on the First Amendment by forcing them to join a union, violating their right to free association, and allowing unions to use their dues to fund political causes they don’t support, violating their right to free speech. These violations are compounded by the use of the corrupt “card check” scheme that does away with the secret ballot and allows union thugs to set up shop as soon as they’ve coerced half the workers to sign a “card” saying they want a union. Ten states have similar arrangements.

Illinois’ defense is that there is a state interest in unionization based on the “labor peace” doctrine that goes back to the earliest days of the union movement. Seemingly, the Supreme Court’s four leftist justices bought this argument relying on a 1977 case, Abood v. Detroit Board of Education. Four of the remaining five judges lean in the opposite direction. Surprisingly, the fence sitter is none other than Antonin Scalia.

Since Abood, the Supremes have tried to protect worker First Amendment rights by drawing a line. Workers can be compelled to pay dues that pay for collective bargaining for wages and benefits, but they can’t be compelled to pay dues that go to political activities. Commentator Charles Krauthammer thinks the stakes are high, saying, if the union loses, “I think this would be a blow to organized labor from which they would not recover.” We’ll find out soon.