Eight California teachers filed a federal lawsuit Monday against their school districts and the California Teachers Association, challenging mandatory union membership and the union dues that come with it.
“Our basic goal is to regain our power, our speech and our right to not associate with an organization that harms us and our students,” said Ryan Yohn, 38, lead plaintiff and an eighth-grade American history teacher at Stacey Middle School in the Westminster School District.
The Center for Individual Rights, a nonprofit libertarian law firm, filed the lawsuit in federal court Monday in Los Angeles on behalf of Yohn and other teachers, including Allen Osborn with the Riverside Unified School District, against various school district superintendents and unions.
The suit aims to resurrect issues raised in an earlier case that ended last year with a 4-4 deadlock before the U.S. Supreme Court.
“It’s really the same case with different plaintiffs,” said Terence Pell, the center’s president.
Last March, following the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, the Supreme Court deadlocked on a lawsuit filed by the center and lead plaintiff Rebecca Friedrichs, a teacher with the Savanna School District in Buena Park.
Friedrichs and other educators said their First Amendment rights are violated when they are forced to pay fees to a union they don’t wish to belong to or support. The Supreme Court denied in June a petition to rehear the case.
But now, as Congress gears up to consider a conservative Supreme Court nominee, Pell said it’s appropriate to have a full court decide the issue.
Union leaders, meanwhile, said a decision against them could impact government workers beyond the teachers’ groups, threatening union membership across the country.
“Unions are made up of teachers, firefighters and other working people,” said Claudia Briggs, spokeswoman for the California Teachers Association. “Whatever happens to us happens to everybody else.”
“If a politically driven agenda trumps that hard work, the ones who suffer will be our children and others who benefit from the service of public employees,” she said.
Teachers are obligated under state law to pay fees meant to cover the costs of collective bargaining. California is one of 23 states with such laws, according to the center.
But government workers can opt out of unions’ political activities – a savings of approximately 30 percent to a teacher’s annual dues of roughly $1,000.
“The simple truth is that no one is required to join a union, and no one is required to pay any fees that go to politics or candidates,” Briggs said, adding that all teachers benefits from collective bargaining. “These individuals don’t want to pay fair-share fees.”
Yohn, a former union representative, counters that he could do better negotiating on his own behalf.
Pell, the center’s president, argued that collective bargaining “is in many ways just as political as the overt political activities” unions engage in.
Pell said he expects the case could reach the U.S. Supreme Court by this fall, with a decision by June 2018.
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