SACRAMENTO, Calif. (April 23, 2002) – The United States District Court for the Eastern District of California today ordered the Professional Engineers in California Government (PECG) union to return nearly $300,000 to California state employees who were illegally forced to pay for lobbying and other union political activities.
U.S. District Court Judge Garland E. Burrell, Jr., ruled that the union had seized almost $100 per employee over a seven-month period in 1999 and ordered the union to pay nominal and compensatory damages to 3,200 non-union employees, totaling approximately $298,000.
“Today’s ruling shows that California’s union officials cannot get away with ripping off the working men and women of this state,” said Stefan Gleason, Vice President of the National Right to Work Foundation, which provided free legal aid to the workers.
National Right to Work Foundation attorneys originally filed the class-action suit, Wagner v. PECG, in September 1999 on behalf of Richard Wagner, an investigator for the California Air Resources Board in the Sacramento area, and Kristin Schwall, a water quality engineer from San Diego. In February 2002, the case was deemed a class-action suit, enabling all 3,200 non-union government workers under the PECG’s statewide memorandum of understanding (MOU) – also known as a collective bargaining agreement – to join the suit.
The PECG is one of California’s most politically active unions. At unusually high levels, union officials have seized union dues and used them to fund its ballot initiatives and other political activities. The court held that 56 percent of the amount charged to non-union employees was not lawfully chargeable to non-members, as it was for politics and other activities not shown to be related to bargaining. In union budgets since 1999, the percentage of dues spent for politics has risen to more than 75 percent of full union dues. In recent weeks, the state engineers filed a related class-action complaint seeking a similar rebate for dues illegally seized since April 2001.
According to the constitutional protections construed by the U.S. Supreme Court in the Foundation-won decisions of Abood v. Detroit Board of Education and Lehnert v. Ferris Faculty Association, the union may not collect compulsory dues spent on activities unrelated to collective bargaining. Politics, lobbying, organizing, public relations, and other non-bargaining activities are explicitly non-chargeable to employees who have exercised their right to refrain from union membership.
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.
