National Right to Work Foundation asks High Court to reconsider precedent blocking states from protecting workers’ right to cut off union payments
Springfield, VA (February 7, 2019) – The National Right to Work Foundation has submitted an amicus curiae brief asking the U.S. Supreme Court to grant a writ of certiorari in a case involving a union’s challenge to part of Wisconsin’s Right to Work Law that allows workers to cut off dues payments at any time with 30 days notice. The State of Wisconsin filed its cert petition in Allen v. International Association of Machinists in January asking the Supreme Court to take the case.
Wisconsin’s Right to Work Law, passed in 2015, makes union membership and dues payments strictly voluntary. That fundamental aspect of the law remains in effect after a separate union legal challenge to that aspect failed and is not part of the case that the Supreme Court has been asked to hear.
To ensure workers could exercise their Right to Work, a provision in the law allows employees to revoke their authorization for union officials to deduct union dues or fees at any time and requires that union officials stop these unauthorized deductions within 30 days. The provision protects workers from “window period” schemes often enforced by union officials to limit workers from revoking authorization for dues or fee deductions except for a few days annually.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit ruled that this part of the statute is preempted by federal law. The Seventh Circuit’s ruling relied on the Supreme Court’s Sea Pak v. Industrial, Technical, & Professional Employees decision issued in 1971, which the state of Wisconsin is now asking the High Court to revisit.
The Foundation’s amicus brief asks the High Court to review the Seventh Circuit’s decision because federal law allows Wisconsin to protect employees from forced payments, including from union-created limitations on cutting off dues.
As the amicus brief notes, Congress left the final decision about whether to permit, outlaw, or limit compulsory unionism to individual states under Section 14(b) of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). This includes allowing states to set a stricter standard for when union officials must halt unauthorized dues or fees deductions than the after one year maximum prescribed by the NLRA.
“Time and again, Big Labor has concocted ways to seize unauthorized dues and fees from workers’ wages through ‘window period’ schemes and other underhanded tactics,” said Mark Mix, president of the National Right to Work Foundation. “The Foundation’s amicus curiae brief advances the widely accepted common-sense argument that Wisconsin and other states should be allowed to create additional protections for workers from compulsory unionism.”
The National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation is a nonprofit, charitable organization providing free legal aid to employees whose human or civil rights have been violated by compulsory unionism abuses. The Foundation, which can be contacted toll-free at 1-800-336-3600, assists thousands of employees in about 200 cases nationwide per year.
