A labor union, which is the target of several lawsuits accusing it of illegally holding onto fees collected from Illinois home caregivers, has agreed to settle one of the latest of those lawsuits, with a woman who said the union refused her request to resign her union membership and to stop collecting dues from the state aid checks paid to her.
On Sept. 11, attorneys with the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation announced they had secured a settlement from labor organization SEIU Healthcare Illinois and Indiana, under which SEIU Healthcare agreed to refund the allegedly wrongly collected fees, and to stop requiring union members to provide photo IDs before they process requests to quit the union.
“This scheme imposed by SEIU-HCII union officials forced Illinois home healthcare providers to produce photo IDs just to stop the flow of their own money that was going to fill union coffers in violation of the First Amendment,” said Mark Mix, president of the National Right to Work Foundation, in a prepared statement.
The settlement deal ends a class action lawsuit filed in May by the National Right to Work Foundation and attorneys from the firm of Morris & De La Rosa, of Chicago. The named plaintiff in the action has been identified as Hydie Nance, of Randolph County in southern Illinois. According to court documents, Nance works as a personal assistant, serving those with disabilities in their homes. She is paid from state assistance checks issued on behalf of the clients with disabilities who she serves.
Nance is not an Illinois state employee. However, SEIU Healthcare for years was designated by the state as a collective bargaining representative for Nance and other similar in-home caregivers paid through state assistance.
For years, the state deducted fees from those assistance checks, and paid the money to SEIU Healthcare.
SEIU Healthcare has consistently made large campaign donations to Illinois Democrats, who control the state government.
However, in two decisions, first in 2014, in the case docketed as Harris v Quinn, and then in 2018, in the case known as Janus v American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down such mandatory fees. The high court ruled those fees violated the speech and association rights of those forced to pay them, against their will.
Following those decisions, Nance was among a growing number of union members who sought to resign from the union.
In Nance’s case, that included submitting a photo ID, when neither the union nor the state of Illinois had required her to submit a photo ID when joining the union.
The lawsuit asserted this allows the union to drag out the process, and continue to collect dues, even after they have been notified of a desire to stop the garnishment.
The lawsuit sought a court order declaring the union’s practices violated the First and Fourteenth Amendment rights of Nance and others like her. The lawsuit asked the court to bar the union from continuing to collect the dues after they have been asked in writing to stop.
According to the settlement, SEIU Healthcare continued to deny the claims of the lawsuit, but wanted “to resolve the issues and claims raised” by the lawsuit.
SEIU Healthcare agreed to refund $245 to Nance, reflecting the dues collected by the union after she had asked them to stop collecting them.
The union also specifically agreed to stop demanding photo IDs from people wishing to leave the union, and to stop rejecting resignation requests, simply because the people seeking to leave the union submitted those requests on forms “created by outside organizations.”
SEIU Healthcare further agreed to “identify from its records” home caregivers who had requested to leave the union and stop dues deductions since May 2018, and were “denied or not processed because they were on forms created by outside organizations or because photo identification was not provided.” The union agreed to process those requests, and issue refunds for all fees wrongly collected.
The settlement marks the first time the union has reached a deal to end such litigation over wrongly collected fees. To date, other lawsuits demanding the unions refund unconstitutional fees have failed in the courts. Judges, including federal appeals judges, have ruled the unions should be allowed to keep the fees, because they were collected in “good faith,” under prior Supreme Court precedent.
In announcing the settlement, Mix urged others to press claims against the unions who wrongly deducted fees from their checks.
“Though this settlement puts an end to this blatantly unconstitutional arrangement, it is outrageous that over two years after Janus was decided and over eight years after Harris was decided, union bosses still refuse to respect, and devise ways to circumvent, the constitutional rights of those they claim to represent,” Mix said.