The Supreme Court will be considering on Friday whether to take two cases that “could be the next Janus for labor unions.”
In 2018, the high court upheld the right of public employees to abandon mandatory unions that had been forcing them to fork over thousands of dollars in an arrangement that violated their right to free speech. In Janus v. American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the justices overturned an Illinois law that compelled public employees to subsidize unions regardless of their personal objections to the unions’ activism.
Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito explained the case’s significant First Amendment implications.
“Compelling individuals to mouth support for views they find objectionable violates that cardinal constitutional command, and in most contexts, any such effort would be universally condemned,” Alito wrote.
Suppose, for example, that the State of Illinois required all residents to sign a document expressing support for a particular set of positions on controversial public issues—say, the platform of one of the major political parties. No one, we trust, would seriously argue that the First Amendment permits this.
From the moment the decision was delivered, however, blue state legislatures have implemented laws to circumvent the high court’s ruling.
Bethany Marcum, the Alaska state director for Americans for Prosperity, and Steve Delie, the director of labor policy at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, explained in an op-ed for Fox News that “in many states, government unions simply fail to tell workers
