OPINION:
In the five years since the Supreme Court’s ruling in Janus v. AFSCME that public sector workers cannot be forced to pay union dues, many unions have adopted a novel legal strategy in response: forgery. In case after case, workers have had money taken directly out of their paychecks by unions based on forged authorizations.
One such case concerns Maria Quezambra, a California single mother who in 2013 took part in a state program that helped her take care of her disabled daughter in her own home. United Domestic Workers of America AFSCME Local 3930 “represented” fund recipients like her on the tenuous grounds that they are state employees.
In essence, union-friendly state lawmakers allowed AFSCME to siphon money directly out of the stipend sent to Ms. Quezambra and others in the program. This is money that the recipients would otherwise use to take care of disabled people.
After the Janus ruling, Ms. Quezambra sought to invoke her rights to stop the involuntary union dues payments, demanding she be refunded going back to 2013. The union refused on the grounds that she had allowed the union to make the deductions. This was news to Ms. Quezambra.
The union “presented Ms. Quezambra a membership and dues deduction authorization card containing a forged signature that she purportedly signed. Ms. Quezambra did not sign this card,” her complaint states.
The card Ms. Quezambra supposedly signed did not have her email address. It had the wrong date of birth, her ex-husband’s phone number — not hers — and a forged signature. AFSCME would eventually concede she did not properly authorize the dues deductions and offered to refund some but not all of the money taken from her. Ms. Quezambra refused the partial refund, demanding the entire sum taken from her: about $2,500.
Torey Jarrett, an employee of Marion County, Oregon, similarly discovered in 2018 that an AFSCME local was deducting dues from her paycheck based on an authorization she never signed. The local has never acknowledged the deception or offered to reimburse the stolen wages.
The Freedom Foundation, a Washington state-based nonprofit that litigates for workers’ rights, has bundled five cases in Janus violations into a single appeal to the Supreme Court seeking redress. The group wants the justices to “reinforce” their own decision.
“Unions and activist judges have been allowed to act as if Janus never happened since the day it was issued. At some point, the court has to demonstrate that it meant what it said and said what it meant,” said James Abernathy, counsel of record for the Freedom Foundation.
The Supreme Court’s 2018 Janus ruling said it was a violation of public sector workers’ First Amendment rights to require them to support a union against their wishes. The ruling said that the dues money could be taken only if the worker “affirmatively consents.”
Unfortunately for those workers, most public sector unions are governed by state and local laws. Most of those laws make the union the worker’s sole representative in all workplace matters, including the payment of dues.
Thus, workers must invoke their Janus rights through their unions, and unions frequently fight tooth and nail to deny those rights. State and local authorities rely on the unions’ say-so in these cases and rarely, if ever, pursue these cases as theft.
Unions force workers to follow arbitrary and bafflingly complex rules to opt out. The process usually involves brief time windows when workers can opt out and long, drawn-out periods for processing workers’ requests.
And that’s when workers even know that they have the Janus rights in the workplace. In some cases, unions never bother to tell workers of their rights under the decision.
Theodore Mendoza, a University of California custodian, learned of his Janus rights from a colleague a year after the ruling and sought to invoke them. Sacramento-based AFSCME Local 3299 refused numerous requests he had made to provide information on when and how to resign.
Eventually, the union sent him a 2017 membership card it claimed he had signed. Mr. Mendoza says he never signed it. The fine print on the membership cards allowed the union to continue to deduct “service fees” equal to full dues, even after members resigned.
To end all payments, Local 3299 members must resign their union memberships, then a send a second request to stop the service fee payments. It’s something Mr. Mendoza and others represented by the foundation say they were never alerted to.
It’s hard to imagine a private business getting away with such fraudulent activity for very long. Unions can because state and local laws typically accept that anything the union does is done on behalf of workers. That leaves little recourse to workers who are abused by a union.
The Supreme Court justices presumably thought that by specifying that dues could be taken only if “the employee affirmatively consents” that they were being perfectly clear about how Janus should be applied.
The cases the Freedom Foundation has highlighted show that unions still haven’t gotten the message.
• Sean Higgins is a research fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free market public policy organization based in Washington, D.C.
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