Not sure how much you folks on the other side of the Atlantic know about unions in the United States, or how closely your news sources follow developments in US labor laws, but there was a massively-important Supreme Court case this summer that made a fundamental change to how public-sector unions work in many states.
A number of states, including California (where I live), have laws on the books that allow public-sector unions to draw union dues from all workers covered by the collective bargaining agreement, even if those workers don't want to join the union, and even if they don't like the union very much. The argument behind these "fair share" dues, or "agency fees," as they're often called, is that all the public-sector workers benefit from the collective bargaining work of the unions, and therefore should contribute to the union's upkeep. Unions had often argued that, if you don't allow agency fees, you end up with too many "free riders"; i.e., people who benefit from unions without contributing to them. This, in turn, makes unions hard to sustain.
These agency fees had been ruled constitutional by the Supreme Court in the
Abood v. Detroit Board of Education case in 1977. I'm not quite sure whether or not there's a similar system for public-sector unions in the UK.
Anyway, in June the Supreme Court issued its ruling in
Janus v. AFSCME, overturning
Abood and finding that agency fees constitute an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment right to freedom of speech. Essentially, they ruled that agency fees constituted a compelled subsidy of speech with which people might disagree.
This case was incredibly closely watched, and was probably one of the most highly-publicized cases of this Supreme Court term, with free market types and anti-union conservatives cheering for the Court to overturn
Abood, and union supporters claiming that, if agency fees were eliminated, it would be the death knell for public-sector unions.
As a union member (in a public-sector union), and as a union supporter and a lefty more generally, I was hoping that the Court would uphold Abood, and I think that there were good Constitutional arguments for doing so. One of the nation's most prominent and well-respected Constitutional scholars, a libertarian-leaning attorney who is, in his own words, "somewhat skeptical of modern American unionism," actually
co-authored an amicus curiae brief in the case arguing that there's no Constitutional problem with compelled speech. As the brief notes, it happens a lot:This seems, on its face, to be a pretty convincing argument to me.
It's too soon yet to know what the long-term consequences of the decision will be. Firstly, in more than 25 states, there will be no change, because those states had not passed laws allowing agency fees. While I hoped the court would uphold
Abood, I was never quite as worried about the outcome as some of my union friends and comrades. I think you could even make the argument that we people who join public-sector unions and support them now have a greater incentive to make sure that our unions are relevant to the people they serve. That way, we can go out and convince our fellow workers that it's worth signing the little piece of paper that makes you a member, and that lets the union take a bit of money out of your paycheck each month.
What I've been most disappointed in, at least in my union, is how many people have taken a head-in-the-sand approach to the
Janus decision. I attended a union kick-off conference in August, where about 150-200 people from our union, from all across the state, got together for a couple of days to talk about the key issues faced by the union in the coming year. Being a naive fool, I assumed that we'd spend time talking about the Janus decision and strategizing about how best to make our union more relevant and attractive to the people we hoped to get as members. And yet, in the opening meeting of the conference, we were basically told that Janus was a dirty word, and that it should not be uttered aloud at the conference. Furthermore, we were told not to mention it when trying to recruit new members in our own workplaces, and if someone asked about it, to downplay it and simply note that the union was determined to flourish despite the efforts of anti-union elements.
I thought that was a profoundly misguided and wrongheaded approach. This is probably the most important legal decision affecting American unions in over 40 years; our response should not be to pretend it never happened.
) and suggested a time when she didn't have a meeting, only for her to say, no can do, only the times you can't make. so i checked her diary again, and found she's free on tuesday morning. sent her an email, sorry you can't make weds afternoon, did check your calendar, advised member that having meetings at times which effectively exclude her chosen companions may lead to a perception the process unfair and could be grounds for an appeal against any formal warning. see you're free tuesday morning, how's that sound?
As you mentioned the GDPR, it’s a bit of a minefield regarding how that info is stored, shared etc.
), but anyone else I should be bookmarking?
