A northwest suburban school employee is suing his labor union, saying he’s being blocked from opting out of membership despite a landmark Supreme Court ruling last year that barred public unions from requiring government employees to pay dues.
Erich Mandel, a diesel mechanic from Palatine, claims in the suit that he tried in August to end his union membership and cease paying dues in the wake of the June decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in Janus v. AFSCME, a case with Illinois roots that determined public sector workers could no longer be required to pay dues to a union as a condition of employment.
But Mandel’s lawsuit, filed last month in federal court in Chicago, says Service Employees International Union Local 73 continued to collect dues from his paycheck “based solely on a union card that (he) purportedly signed” prior to the Janus ruling, before he had the right to opt out.
Hello! We know there’s a lot of news out there, but we’re bringing you an education-centric take on the midterms, with big results in some key states.
Arizona
Arizona is one of five states that saw teacher walkouts this past spring. After a grassroots group of public school supporters put it on the ballot, what would have been the nation’s broadest school voucher expansion was overturned Tuesday 2-to-1 by popular referendum.
Arizona has been considered a model state by school choice advocates, so the rebuke is a notable shift.
It’s been two months since the Supreme Court handed Gov. Bruce Rauner a huge victory in a landmark case that curtailed the power of public-sector labor unions.
The 5-4 decision in the case of Mark Janus versus AFSCME Council 31 may have started in Illinois, but the ruling had national implications — though the full extent isn’t yet clear.
“It’ll certainly take a while to determine” the impact, said Robert Bruno, a labor expert who teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Hard numbers don’t yet exist, but by next year, filings with the federal Department of Labor will show any effects on Illinois’ major labor unions, he said.
State workers previously paying “fair share” fees no longer have money deducted from their paychecks on behalf of a union.
On June 27, the U.S. Supreme Court declared forced union fees violate the First Amendment rights of government workers.
And some state workers are already taking home more money.
Prior to the court’s decision, Illinois state workers who opted out of union membership still had to pay “fair share” fees to the union. Those fees totaled over $700 a year on average, according to an email sent by the Illinois Department of Central Management Services to state employees on June 27.
But after the court ruled in Janus v. AFSCME that those fees violate workers’ rights, the state announced it would stop deducting fair share fees from workers who had already opted out of the union.
My home state of Illinois is in financial free fall. The state has billions of dollars in unpaid bills, has unbalanced budgets and is bleeding people and money.
A state doesn’t get into a mess like this overnight. It’s the result of many seemingly small decisions over many years. It’s for that reason that I fought to not be part of that mess — all the way up to the Supreme Court.
In 2017, as media pundits wondered whether Illinois would be the first state to have its credit rating downgraded to junk status, I watched the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) union lobby for higher taxes to pay for higher salaries and benefits for government workers such as me. Certainly, my salary wasn’t the cause of the state’s financial woes, but when you consider that I have had a raise almost every year I have been working for the state — and that I work alongside more than 35,000 other state employees — you can begin to see how that might affect the state’s bottom line. That’s in addition to the incredibly generous, taxpayer-funded pension offered to state workers — an average of $1.6 million per state employee, according to a report from the Illinois Policy Institute.
