The Teacher Who Could Gut Unions

A Supreme Court decision coming by the end of June could be devastating for organized labor. The case, Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association (CTA), challenges a 1977 ruling allowing public-sector unions to charge nonmembers covered by union contracts mandatory fees to pay for the costs of collective bargaining. The lead plaintiff, Rebecca Friedrichs, is an elementary school teacher. She claims that being forced to pay money to California’s politically powerful and overwhelmingly Democratic teachers’ union as a condition of her employment violates her First Amendment rights.

Conservatives want the court to ban the mandatory fees. That would create a crisis for organized labor, about half of whose members are in the public sector; dues and fees made up $174 million of CTA’s reported $186 million in revenue in 2013. It could also cause trouble for Democrats, who depend on union support during elections. CTA reported spending $211 million on campaigns and lobbying from 2000 to 2009, according to Friedrichs’s suit, including $26 million to oppose a school-voucher proposition.