LABOR/SUPREME COURT: “The Supreme Court on Thursday [9-28-17] agreed to hear a case that could deal a crushing blow to organized labor.
It was one of 11 cases the justices added to the court’s docket from the roughly 2,000 petitions seeking review that had piled up during the court’s summer break.
In the labor case, the court will consider whether public-sector unions may require workers who are not members to help pay for collective bargaining. If the court’s answer is no, unions would probably lose a substantial source of revenue.
The question was before the justices last year in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, and they seemed poised to rule against the unions when the case was argued in January 2016. But the death of Justice Antonin Scalia the next month resulted in a 4-to-4 deadlock.
That may have given the unions only a brief reprieve. Justice Scalia’s replacement, Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, has voted consistently with the court’s more conservative members and is likely to supply a fifth vote against the unions.
A ruling allowing workers to refuse to pay the fees would be the culmination of a decades-long campaign by conservative groups aimed at weakening unions that represent public employees.”
-Adam Liptak, “Supreme Court Will Hear Case on Mandatory Fees to Unions,” The New York Times online, Sept. 28, 2017