Janus Rights clarification?
From the Free Beacons’ Bill McMorris:
A group of Minnesota parents caring for family members is asking the Supreme Court to help them break away from union representation.
On Thursday, the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation petitioned the Supreme Court to review Bierman v. Dayton, a case challenging exclusive union representation. The case was filed on behalf of home health workers, including a mother caring for a child with cerebral palsy. The aides claim that they have been forced to surrender their representation rights to labor giant Service Employees International Union Minnesota Healthcare despite the fact that only 13 percent of workers participated in a 2014 mail-in representation election.
“For those who do not want that union speaking on their behalf, exclusive representation results in a ‘significant impingement on [their] associational freedoms,'” the petition says, pointing to the Court’s June opinion in Janus v. AFSCME. “SEIU’s authority to speak for providers necessarily associates them with SEIU and its speech.”
The Right to Work Foundation has scored several major victories before the Supreme Court in recent years, including successfully overturning an Illinois scheme to force home health aides to pay union dues in the 2014 Harris v. Quinn case. The group also represented government workers in Janus v. AFSCME, which successfully overturned longstanding precedent in public sector unionism. In June, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that forcing government employees to pay union dues or fees as a condition of employment violated the First Amendment rights of workers.