An Amicus Brief Was Just Filed With The Supreme Court Asking The Court To Hear The Issue Of Exclusive Representation 'Schemes'
How local and state governments are imposing unions on workers without their consent.
Peter List, Editor | August 22, 2024
On Thursday, an amicus brief (for a writ of certiorari) was filed with the U.S. Supreme Court for the Court to clarify a prior decision from 1984 that, if successful, could weaken a new form of "exclusive representation" for unions.
Filed on behalf of the Coalition for a Democratic Workplace, which “represents millions of businesses employing tens of millions of workers across the country in nearly every industry,” the amicus brief asks the Court to hear a case involving local legislators’ in cities and states “adopting new regulatory schemes that impose representation on hundreds of thousands of unwilling workers.”
Citing a number of examples, from Massachusetts’ Rideshare Petition (authorizing a single union to represent every rideshare driver in state after a truncated organizing process) to the SEIU’s Fast Food Workers’ industry-wide representation in California, the CDW’s attorneys, Michael Lotito and Alex MacDonald of Littler Mendelson’s Workplace Policy Institute, state:
Workers are being collected under quasi-public “coregulation” schemes. These schemes force workers to accept the services of “representatives” with power over their wages, hours, and working conditions. These representatives are not elected, but appointed. And they are effectively unaccountable to anyone but their political patrons— who are almost always labor unions.
“These regulations then bind all workers in the covered industry, whether or not the affected workers participated in the process,” the brief states.
As a form of representation, these boards are vanishingly thin. Workers cannot elect their representatives. Instead, the representatives are appointed by the government….And once appointed, the representatives have few if any duties to the people they represent. They owe no duty of fair representation, cannot be recalled, and need not consider the wishes of workers. Instead, they are simply appointed to their seats and stay there until their terms expire.
“Broad as these schemes are, even more adventurous ones are afoot,” the brief notes. “In New York, a proposed cosmetology board would have authority not only over wages and working conditions, but also over minimum prices.”
The genesis of these ‘schemes’ stems from a “distorted view” of a 1984 Supreme Court decision called Minnesota State Board for Community Colleges v. Knight.
“Knight stood for the straightforward principle that people could not force the government to listen to their views,” the brief explains. “But lower courts have extended it beyond that principle to allow essentially any form of government-imposed exclusive representation, including the form at issue in this petition.”
“That view of Knight is wrong, and it should be corrected. But it can be corrected only by this Court,” the brief concludes.
Read the brief here.
Related: The Buckeye Institute Calls on SCOTUS to End Forced Union Exclusive Representation Laws
