The U.S. Supreme Court has turned aside cases brought by Illinois teachers and school workers who claimed their unions violated their rights by refusing to let them immediately leave the union, and refusing to refund dues the union took from their paychecks, even after they said they wanted out.
On Nov. 1, the high court denied petitions from the teachers, as they sought to appeal lower court decisions that sided with the unions in the dispute over the reach of the Supreme Court’s landmark Janus decision.
The petition denials came without comment or dissent from any of the court’s nine justices.
The plaintiffs had filed the petitions for so-called writs of certiorari, in an attempt to secure the chance to persuade the Supreme Court to overturn decisions from federal judges in Chicago and elsewhere in Illinois, and from panels of judges at the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals.
The denial of the petitions now leaves those lower court decisions intact.
In one of the cases, Chicago Public Schools teachers Joanne Troesch and Ifeoma Nkemdi argued the Chicago Teachers Union and the Chicago Board of Education illegally refused to stop taking dues from their paychecks, after the teachers informed the CTU of their desire to leave the union.
In another case, Susan Bennett, a custodian at the Moline-Coal Valley School District, similarly accused the union she had belonged to, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Local 72, of continuing to claim dues from her pay, even after she notified the union of her desire to resign from the union.
In both cases, the unions asserted the workers are only allowed to end their membership at one particular “escape period” each year. If workers do not resign their membership during that window, they are locked in to paying dues for the remainder of the year, the unions said.
The plaintiffs argued such policies are unconstitutional under the Supreme Court’s decision in Janus v AFSCME. In that case, the high court ruled the First Amendment should prevent unions from extracting dues or other fees from the paychecks of public workers who don’t wish to support the union’s political positions.
The plaintiffs said the unions’ reliance on “escape periods” amounts to a decision to all but thumb their noses at the Janus decision. The unions “devised new ways to compel state employees to subsidize union speech,” according to a brief filed with the U.S. Supreme Court by 16 state attorneys general, who backed the school workers in the dispute.
Federal district judges and Seventh Circuit judges, however, determined the unions and government employers were within their rights to continue claiming money from the paychecks of workers attempting to leave the union, because the escape period language was included in their contract.
To find otherwise would essentially empower workers to nullify the terms of the contract they agreed to, the judges said.
The Chicago teachers have been represented by the Chicago firm of Morris & De La Rosa, as well as by the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, of Springfield, Va.
The CTU has been represented by attorneys with the firms of Bredoff & Kaiser and Dowd Bloch Bennett Cervone Auerbach & Yokich, all of Chicago.
In the Moline case, Bennett has been represented by attorneys with the Liberty Justice Center, of Chicago.
AFSCME has been defended by the firms of Dowd Bloch Bennett Cervone Auerbach & Yokich, of Chicago, and Bredhoff & Kaiser, of Washington, D.C.
The school district has been defended by Hodges, Loizzi, Eisenhammer, Rodick & Kohn, which has offices in Arlington Heights and Peoria.