Abood v. Detroit Board of Education

Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, legal case in which the U.S. Supreme Court, on May 23, 1977, ruled unanimously (9–0) that agency-shop (or union-shop) clauses in the collective-bargaining agreements of public-sector unions cannot be used to compel nonunion employees to fund political or ideological activities of the union to which they object. The Court nevertheless held, by a 6–3 majority, that nonunion employees in the public sector may be required to fund union activities related to “collective bargaining, contract administration, and grievance adjustment purposes.”

Background

Agency-shop clauses generally require nonunion employees, as a condition of their employment, to pay service fees to the union equal to a certain portion of union dues. The union itself is legally required to represent all relevant employees of the company with which it enters into a collective-bargaining agreement, including those who refuse to join the union. The purpose of agency-shop clauses is to protect unions against free riding, a situation in which nonunion employees benefit from the union’s collective-bargaining activities without contributing to its costs. In Railway Employees’ Dept. v. Hanson (1956), the Supreme Court upheld the prevention of free riding as a valid rationale for the inclusion of agency-shop clauses in collective-bargaining agreements.

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Abood v. Detroit Board of Education arose in 1969 when Christine Warczak and other nonunion teachers in Detroit filed a class-action suit in Michigan state court alleging, among other things, that the agency-shop clause in the collective-bargaining agreement between the Detroit Federation of Teachers and the Detroit Board of Education violated Michigan law and their U.S. constitutional right to freedom of association (guaranteed by the First and Fourteenth amendments), because “a substantial part of the sums required to be paid” under the clause were used to support “various social activities for the benefit of [the union’s] members which are not available to nonmembers as a matter of right” and “a number and variety of activities and programs…of which Plaintiffs do not approve, and in which they will have no voice, and which are not and will not be collective bargaining activities.” After the trial court granted summary judgment to the defendants—but before the Michigan Court of Appeals had heard the case—the Michigan Supreme Court held in Smigel v. Southgate Community School District that agency shops in the public sector were prohibited by state law. Accordingly, the Court of Appeals remanded Warczak’s case to the trial court, where it was combined with a similar suit by D. Louis Abood and others and heard in 1973 as Abood v. Detroit Board of Education. The court once again granted summary judgment to the defendants, this time on the basis of a new state law, adopted after Smigel, that expressly authorized agency shops and in light of the court’s own determination that such clauses were constitutional. The Court of Appeals, holding that the trial court had erroneously applied the agency-shop law retroactively, again remanded the case, also finding that, although the expenditures the plaintiffs objected to “could violate [their] First and Fourteenth Amendment rights,” the plaintiffs were not entitled to restitution of their service fees because they had failed to “make known to the union those causes and candidates to which [they] object.” After the Michigan Supreme Court refused to review the case, the plaintiffs appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which heard oral arguments on November 9, 1976.

Opinion

In a unanimous opinion written by Justice Potter Stewart, the Supreme Court ruled that agency-shop clauses, whether in the public or the private sector, do not significantly infringe the freedom of association (guaranteed by the First Amendment) of nonunion employees, provided that they do not compel those employees to support activities or causes unrelated to collective bargaining. “Such interference as exists,” the Court held, “is constitutionally justified by the legislative assessment of the important contribution of the union shop to the system of labor relations established by Congress.” Importantly, the decision was not a blanket prohibition of a union’s use of service fees for political or ideological causes. Rather, following Abood, it became permissible for public employees to oppose a union’s use of service-fee contributions for one political or ideological cause while supporting its use of the fees for other such causes. As a direct result of the decision, public schools were prohibited from conditioning the employment of teachers on their support of union activities and programs outside the scope of collective bargaining.

More than 35 years later, in Harris v. Quinn (2014), the Supreme Court held (5–4) that nonunion workers who were paid by the state of Illinois to provide personal assistance to elderly, disabled, or injured persons could not be required to make service-fee contributions to a union to help fund its collective-bargaining activities, because they were not “full-fledged” public employees. In its decision the Court severely criticized Abood but declined to overturn it. In Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (2018), the Supreme Court finally overturned the Abood decision, ruling (5–4) that it was “inconsistent with standard First Amendment principles,” because service fees for collective-bargaining activity effectively compel nonunion employees to subsidize union speech on matters of “great public importance.” The Court also asserted that Abood was “poorly reasoned,” “unworkable,” and inconsistent with other First Amendment cases.