As you can imagine, this has some people in the teacher unions very concerned.

George Leef reported at See Thru Edu.

An Upcoming Supreme Court Case Has Education Unions Worried

At the end of its recently completed term, the Supreme Court announced a number of the cases it has decided to hear when its new term begins in October. One of those cases is Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association. The key issue is whether public workers represented by unions, including teachers and professors, should be free from having to pay dues that go towards politics unless they affirmatively choose to opt in and agree to pay.

As matters now stand in California and other non-Right to Work states, unions only have to allow dissenting workers the opportunity to opt out of paying dues for things other than collective bargaining and related matters. Naturally, the unions have contrived to make it as hard as possible for anyone to do that.

Over many years, the Supreme Court has recognized that compulsory unionism raises First Amendment issues when the dues money extracted from workers is used to fund political speech and activism that the individuals do not favor. In the 1977 Abood case, the Court approved of the “opt-out” approach, but that precedent seems to be on thin ice after two recent decisions, Knox v. SEIU and Harris v. Quinn.

The Court has ruled that just as people have a First Amendment right to speak freely, they also have a First Amendment right not to be compelled to subsidize speech by others that they do no agree with. When public unions make it difficult for workers to avoid the latter, there’s a constitutional problem. As attorney Deborah LaFetra of Pacific Legal Foundation explains here, “If a teacher doesn’t want to support the union’s politicking but fails to file her objection within the six-week window, she must pay the entire amount.”

Predictably, the Court’s decision to hear Friedrichs has set off alarms in the offices of public unions.