Supreme Court holds "that union fees violate 'the free speech rights of nonmembers by compelling them to subsidize private speech on matters of substantial public concern.'"

SCOTUSblog reports on the 5-4 decision in Janus.

Here's the PDF of the opinion.

SCOTUSblog writes:

In reasonably plain English: This is a case about whether government employees who are represented by a union to which they do not belong can be required to pay a fee to cover the costs of collective bargaining. The plaintiff in this case, an Illinois state employee, argued that having to pay the fees violates the First Amendment. Today the Court agreed, ruling for the employee and against the union.

The important idea here is that unions for government employees are different from other unions and that everything they do, including bargaining for wages, is political, because they are making a deal with the government. I want to look at the opinion to see how this idea is discussed.

From the opinion (written by Justice Alito):

In addition to affecting how public money is spent, union speech in collective bargaining addresses many other important matters.... [U]nions express views on a wide range of subjects—education, child welfare, healthcare, and minority rights, to name a few... What unions have to say on these matters in the context of collective bargaining is of great public importance.... Even union speech in the handling of grievances may be of substantial public importance and may be directed at the “public square.” ....

[W]e conclude that public-sector agency-shop arrangements violate the First Amendment, and Abood erred in concluding otherwise. There remains the question whether stare decisis nonethe­less counsels against overruling Abood. It does not.... An important factor in determining whether a precedent should be overruled is the quality of its reasoning....

Abood... did not sufficiently take into account the difference between the effects of agency fees in public- and private-sector collective bargaining. The challengers in Abood argued that collective bargaining with a govern­ment employer, unlike collective bargaining in the private sector, involves “inherently ‘political’ ” speech. The Court did not dispute that characterization, and in fact conceded that “decisionmaking by a public employer is above all a political process” driven more by policy concerns than economic ones....

We recognize that the loss of payments from nonmem­ bers may cause unions to experience unpleasant transition costs in the short term, and may require unions to make adjustments in order to attract and retain members. But we must weigh these disadvantages against the consider­ able windfall that unions have received under Abood for the past 41 years. It is hard to estimate how many bil­ lions of dollars have been taken from nonmembers and transferred to public-sector unions in violation of the First Amendment. Those unconstitutional exactions cannot be allowed to continue indefinitely.

From Justice Kagan:

Unlike the majority, I see nothing “questionable” about Abood’s analysis.... The decision’s account of why some government entities have a strong interest in agency fees (now often called fair-share fees) is fundamentally sound. And the balance Abood struck between public employers’ interests and public employees’ expression is right at home in First Amendment doctrine.