Last week, the Arizona-based Goldwater Institute filed a “friend of the court” brief in Friedrichs v. California Teacher’s Association urging the U.S. Supreme Court to rule in favor of Rebecca Friedrichs and nine other California public school teachers who are challenging the requirement that teachers must pay dues to the teacher’s union as a condition of employment.
The Goldwater Institute is interested in this case because of the implications it could have on a case the Institute has filed in North Dakota, Fleck v. McDonald. That case challenges the requirement that lawyers must join the state bar association in order to earn a living practicing law. Bar associations, like teachers unions, spend mandatory dues money on politics, often without the permission of members.
In the California teachers’ case, the teachers are challenging a law that allows them to decline union membership, but still requires them to pay union dues before they can be hired as a public school teacher. This arrangement, known as “agency shop” laws, forces teachers to pay full dues to the union annually, even if they aren’t members, and then ask for a refund for the roughly 30 percent of their dues that the union says is spent purely on politics. The rest of their dues are non-refundable and are supposed to be spent on non-political things that benefit all teachers, even those who aren’t members of the union, like collective bargaining.
The teachers are asserting that collective bargaining is inherently political and that the benefits offered to teachers as a result of collective bargaining are not true benefits to all teachers. Creating workplace rules that keep ineffective teachers in the classroom or prevent merit-pay systems are examples.
In 26 states individuals are forced to fund public teachers unions in order to earn a living as a public school teachers. A favorable ruling in the Friedrich case would protect the First Amendment rights of public school teachers. The case was originally filed by the Center for Individual Rights.