Unions just got a rare bit of good news from the Supreme Court

“By law, unions must represent every worker in a unionized shop, regardless of whether each individual worker joins the union. If a union contract provides that every worker gets a 5 percent raise, for example, that raise must go to everyone in the shop, including workers who choose not to join the union.

This arrangement creates a free-rider problem. If workers receive all the benefits negotiated by a union without having to pay to join the unions, then many workers will elect not to join the union. If too many workers make that decision, the union will be starved of the funds that it needs to operate and will collapse — and then no one will receive the benefits of unionization.

According to a 2021 paper by the Economic Policy Institute’s Larry Mishel, “the union wage premium — the percentage-higher wage earned by those covered by a collective bargain­ing contract — is 13.6 percent over­all.” So workers typically are better off if they work in a unionized shop, even if they have to pay a small percentage of their wages as fees to the union.

Agency fees are a common solution to the free-rider problem. Often, when a union negotiates a contract with an employer, that contract will include a provision allowing the union to charge such fees to nonmembers, which reimburse the union for the cost of providing its services to those nonmembers.

Many states, however, have so-called “right-to-work” laws, which prohibit agency fees. In Janus I, the Supreme Court held that public sector unions are forbidden from charging such fees anywhere in the country. So public sector unions are now under a “right-to-work” regime even in states that reject such laws.”

https://www.vox.com/2021/1/25/22248497/supreme-court-unions-janus-afscme-agency-fees-retroactive

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