Monday, a National Right to Work Foundation staff attorney argued for three Wisconsin public employees who are asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit (located in Chicago) to uphold all of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s public-sector unionism reform measures, known as "Act 10."
The case is on appeal after a federal circuit court judge in Wisconsin struck down Wisconsin’s new union recertification requirements and ban on the use of taxpayer funded-payroll systems to collect union dues from general employees’ paychecks, and excluded the three workers from participating fully in the case.
With free legal assistance from the National Right to Work Foundation and the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, Pleasant Prairie teacher Kristi Lacroix, Waukesha high school teacher Nathan Berish, and trust fund specialist at the Wisconsin Department of Employee Trust Funds Ricardo Cruz filed a motion to intervene in the lower court. When their motion to intervene was denied, the employees appealed and were given a portion of the argument time in Monday’s appeals court argument.
The three workers are asking the appellate court to uphold the law as a whole as constitutional especially the law’s Right to Work protections — relying on Foundation-won U.S. Supreme Court precedents in which the Court held that union bosses have no constitutional right to collect fees from nonmembers and that unions have no constitutional right to use government resources to deduct dues from workers’ paychecks.
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.