Houghton, MI (December 4, 2014) – With the help of National Right to Work Foundation staff attorneys, a local middle school teacher has filed charges with the Michigan Employee Relations Commission (MERC) against the Michigan Education Association (MEA) union for blocking his attempt to resign from the union and demanding he continue to pay full dues.

Jeffery Hauswirth, a veteran Houghton Middle School teacher, sent a letter to the union announcing his resignation on August 30, 2013. According to the MEA’s bylaws, teachers can only leave the the union by sending a resignation letter during the month of August. MEA officials claim that they only received Hauswirth’s resignation letter in September and that the letter was not postmarked in August.

In June 2014, union officials notified Hauswirth that he owed nearly $700 in union dues for the 2013-2014 year despite the fact that he resigned in August.

The United States Supreme Court has long held that workers have a right to resign from a labor union at any time. Moreover, Michigan’s recently-enacted public sector Right to Work law explicitly states that public employees cannot be restrained from voluntarily leaving a union.

Hauswirth’s charges seek to force the MEA to recognize his August 2013 resignation and stop attempting to collect union dues for the 2013-2014 year. The charges also seek to have the union remove any restriction on members resigning from its bylaws and notify its members, via letters and public notices on workplace bulletin boards, that it was guilty of an unfair labor practice.

“Union officials often force workers to jump through bureaucratic hoops to discourage them from exercising their workplace rights,” said Patrick Semmens, Vice President of the National Right to Work Foundation. “Despite the passage of Michigan’s public sector Right to Work legislation, union bosses will continue to circumvent the law’s protections until MERC stops these illegal attempts to prevent Michigan public employees from exercising their rights.”

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 more than 250 cases nationwide per year.